The BBC New website tells us that this mean “together” in Dari, but there seems to be a disagreement between Radio and Television about its pronunciation. Radio 4 newsreaders are all stressing the first syllable, while their television colleagues are stressing the second.

I don’t know if Dari has a strong preference for stress placement, but whether it does or not, shouldn’t they decide on one or the other, and stick to it? Frank Gardner, the BBC’s security analyst, is in Afghanistan at the moment, and reporting for both sets of output. Is he having to either avoid the word altogether, or else adjust his pronunciation according to the programme he’s taking part in?

This isn’t a question of one or other being “correct” (although if Dari is like Iranian Farsi in its stress patterns, the final syllable is likely to be the most prominent), but consistency. Stress placement is one of the questions most frequently raised with me by non-linguists, both in English words and foreign names.

Here are two place names whose pronunciation history converged for a time and then diverged again.

Wymondham is, in my experience, always pronounced /ˈwɪndəm/. I don’t have access to either of the Engish Place Name Society (EPNS)’s volumes on Norfolk, but the Oxford Names Companion gives its origin as ‘homestead of a man called Wīgmund’. The pronunciation was presumably something like /ˈwiːgmʊndhæm/. Over time, the /g/ and /h/ will have disappeared, the /ʊ/ and /æ/, being unstressed vowels, will have reduced to schwa, leaving /ˈwiːməndəm/. The first schwa then also goes the way of all flesh, and the /m/ assimilates to the following /n/: /ˈwiːndəm/. At some stage /iː/ is shortened, and hey presto, we have /ˈwɪndəm/. This must all have happened before the Great Vowel Shift started to apply.

Wymondley, according to both the EPNS on Hertfordshire and the Oxford Names Companion, has a slightly different man’s name as its root: Wilmund. The EPNS volume was published in the 1930s, and gives the pronunciation, as we might expect, /ˈwɪmli/, following the same sort of path as Wymondham. However, the only pronunciation I ever hear now (and I live about three miles from Great Wymondley – Little Wymondley is a couple of miles further away), is /ˈwaɪməndli/. I’ve just consulted a scion of a long-established Hertfordshire family, and she tells me her father used to say /ˈwɪmli/, but only in a jokey sort of way. So, the spelling pronunciation was around for most of the 20th century, and can’t be attributed simply to incomers to Letchworth Garden City (founded in 1903) and Stevenage New Town (1947). This distorts the etymology: there was never a long vowel in the first syllable, so /ˈwiːməndli/ was never the pronunciation, so far as we can tell, and /ˈwaɪməndli/’s only justification is as a spelling pronunciation.

I thought Uttoxeter deserved a post of its own, because it also raises a transcription and dialect question.

Both /ʌt/ and /ʊt/ have been quoted, by Michael Lamb and John Maidment, as possible pronunciations of the initial sounds, and I agree. But in northern dialects the /ʌ/ ~ /ʊ/ split never happened, so the vowel used by locals unaffected by “education” (as John and I have been!) is still the equivalent of /ʊ/. On the phonological level, this is fine.

However, to transcribe it as /ʊ/ for all northern accents/dialects, as is most often done, leads to parodists of these accents/dialects using the southern English /ʊ/ indiscriminately in both STRUT and FOOT. If I try to recall my own “pre-educated” pronunciation, the nearest southern English vowel is actually a short /ɔː/, and this is certainly what I hear from my unreconstructed friends and relatives who have not had my “advantages”. This means that there are minimal pairs between but and bought, pun and pawn, full and fall, where the distinction is one of vowel length only. (Incidentally, when I’m tired, I may get /ʌ/ and /ʊ/ the “wrong” way round, and am quite likely to say /pʌt ʊp/ instead of /pʊt ʌp/. Birth will out!)

This is the situation for North Staffordshire as I hear it. I can’t find much in the literature about the phonetics of the speech of the Potteries. Certainly TV and radio adaptations of Arnold Bennett never have actors with convincing accents. There are several examples of this undifferentiated vowel from Garth Crooks (former footballer, now broadcaster) here.

John Wells was mentioning (here) the unpredictability of the pronunciation of British place and family names from their spellings, and some are recorded in the Dictionary of Blunders. The fact that they are mentioned at all must mean that in the author’s opinion they were being mispronounced, and this may be giving us an indication that in some cases the pronunciation was actually changing at the time he was writing (the 1870s or early 1880s).

ABERGAVENNY (family name) is pronounced Abergen’-ny. (This is also still, apparently, the pronunciation of the Marquis of Abergavenny, although it is not his family name.)

BELFAST is pronounced Bĕl-făst’, not Bĕl’-fast. (The author does not specify the exact pronunciation of ‘a’ the second time. Nowadays either stress pattern seems to be acceptable, and either /æ/ or /ɑː/ for the ‘a’.)

BERKELEY STREET is pronounced Bark-ley Street, and not as spelled.

BERKSHIRE is pronounced Bark-shire, and not as spelled. (There are some British dialects in which ‘er’ is still pronounced /ɜː/.)

CARSHALTON is pronounced Casehorton. (The BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names acknowledges that this had existed, but by 1971 was no longer heard. The pre-war BBC publication Broadcast English II, which covered English place names, did not include it at all.)

CHOLMONDELEY (family name) is pronounced Chum’ley.

CINQUE (the Cinque Ports) is pronounced like sank. (Not today it isn’t. The BBC recommendation is ’sink’.)

CIRENCESTER is pronounced Cissester. (Strangely, the BBC’s original recommendation, in 1930, was /ˈsɪsɪtə(r)/. Nowadays, the spelling pronunciation has prevailed: /ˈsaɪrənsestə(r)/, and I believe it is often shortened to /ˈsaɪrən/.)

COCKBURN (family name) should be pronounced Coburn, and not as spelled. (This applies to the port, and some years ago, an advert appeared in the London Underground:

Said King Charles to his court

“I enjoy a good port.”

Said a courtier game

“If I tell you the name

of the best will you make me a knight?”

The king nodded his head

and the courtier said

“Cockburn’s Port is the port for a king.

But remember to say it without the C K.”

So the court cried “Long live Harles the Ing!”)

COLQUHOUN (the name of a person) is pronounced Cǒ-hoo’n. (It still is.)

COWPER. The poet called himself Cooper, and not Cow-per.

CRICHTON is pronounced krī’ton, not krĭk’ton.

HELENA is pronounced Hĕl’-ĕ-na, not Hē-lē’na.

JACQUES is zhāk in French and jakes in English. (This is ambiguous, because the writer uses ā sometimes for /ɑː/ and sometimes for /eɪ/.)

MACLEOD is pronounced mak-loud, not măk-le’-ŏd.

MAINWARING (a family name) is pronounced Mannering.

MARJORIBANKS (a family name) is pronounced Marchbanks.

NAOMI is pronouncec Na’-o-mi, not Na-ō’-mi.

NASMYTH is pronounced Na’smith, not Naz’-mith.

PHŒBE (a female Christian name) is pronounced Fē’-bē.

ST. JOHN (a family name) is pronounced Sin’-jun.

ST. MAUR (Earl) is pronounced Sĕ-maur.