In the late 1980s and 1990s, Oxford University Press published three books of names: The Oxford Dictionary of Surnames (Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges, 1988); A Dictionary of First Names (Hanks and Hodges, 1990); and A Dictionary of English Place-Names (A.D.Mills, 1998). Then in 2002, OUP decided to reissue all three volumes under a single cover as The Oxford Names Companion. I am naturally disappointed that they did not include a fourth title: The BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names (G.E.Pointon, 1983), as this would have nicely complemented all three.

Unfortunately, they did not take this opportunity of updating the volumes to make them consistent.

I don’t think I’m unusual in this: when I got my copy of the Companion, I looked up my own name. It’s there, in both the Surnames and the Place-Names sections, but the entries do not correspond.

Surname:

Pointon English: habitation name from a place in Lincs., so called from OE Pohhingtūn ’settlement (OE tūn) associated with Pohha‘, a byname apparently meaning ‘Bag’ (cf. POKE). Var.: Poynton

Place-Name:

Pointon Lincs. Pochinton 1086 (DB). ‘Estate associated with a man called Pohha’. OE pers. name + -ing- + -tūn.

Poynton Ches. Povinton 1249. ‘Estate associated with a man called *Pofa’.  OE pers. name + -ing- + -tūn.

Poynton Green Shrops. Peventone 1086 (DB). ‘Estate associated with a man called *Pēofa’. OE pers. name + -ing- + -tūn.

(DB = Domesday Book; * before a name means it is not attested)

So we have three places from which the Pointons/Poyntons may take their name, not one. How can we decide which is the most likely in any particular case? University College London and the National Trust have come to our aid.

There is now a website, http://www.nationaltrustnames.org.uk/, which tracks the distribution of family names in Great Britain in 1881 and 1998.

This gives the absolute frequency of a name, and also its relative frequency (occurrences per million of the population) and ranking (where its frequency stands in relation to all other family names). There is also a map which shows the areas where the name appears most frequently. In both 1881 and 1998 there were heavy concentrations for both spellings in Staffordshire and Cheshire. Allowing for some of the south Staffordshire families having moved there from Shropshire, it seems clear that the Companion has got it wrong in stating categorically that Pointon originates in Lincolnshire - the least likely origin of the three possible ones for the vast majority of Pointons, who live in north Staffordshire and south Cheshire. Hanks and Hodges seem to have been beguiled by the spelling, which is clearly arbitrary, and to have ignored the evidence in their own research for the alternative (Poynton).

In fact, French names cause all sorts of problems for English speakers, not least of where to put the stress. French, of course, has no lexical stress, but it would be impossible for an English speaker to avoid stressing at least one syllable in a name. Where should that stress go?

The names of Presidents of the Fifth Republic provide a fair sample.  De Gaulle was no problem: two syllables, the first has a neutral vowel in both languages, so the second was the natural choice for stress. But then Pompidou was the first of three to have three syllables. The nearest to a stressed syllable in French would be the last, as phrasal stress falls there. That would lead to Pompi’dou, and also Mitte’rrand, and Sarko’zy. None of these sounds natural in English, but interestingly, while the first two lend themselves to initial stress in English (and this was the BBC recommendation in both cases): ‘Pompidou and ‘Mitterrand, the current President seems most comfortably stressed on the second syllable: Sar’kozy. In fact, as we know, Sarkozy is not a French name at all, but Hungarian, in which language it would have been stressed on the first syllable. However, the BBC recommendation is to stress the final syllable, with the predictable result that many journalists, who are not obliged to follow the Pronunciation Unit’s advice, ignore it, and go with Sar’kozy, which is neither French nor Hungarian, and sounds the least French-like to me.

Interspersed between these three, we had Giscard d’Estaing, who fits quite well as ‘Giscard des’taing, and Chirac, whom most people stressed on the first syllable (which was the BBC recommendation), but a few who “knew better”, on the second. Americans, mindful of the fact that these are foreign names, almost invariably pronounce the letter A as a long one, so /ʃirɑːk/. They also have a tendency to stress all shortish French names on the final syllable, so mostly /ʃi’rɑːk/.

On a lighter note, Pompidou caused some childish hilarity in Norway, as “pomp i do” in Norwegian means ‘bottom in toilet’.

Both my son and my daughter have reported that when giving their name, it has been repeated back to them as “Quinton” rather than “Pointon”, and this has twice happened to me recently. Neither name is particularly common. What we have here is surely a synchronic example of the diachronic development of one of these sound complexes into the other, as is postulated for one of the differences between P-Celtic and Q-Celtic (Welsh pedwar and pump - ‘four’ and ‘five’ - versus Irish a ceathair and a cúig, for instance). The reconstructed Indo-European *kw developed into Latin ‘qu’ - quattuor and quinque, but into Germanic ‘p’ and then ‘f’ (English four, five, German vier, fünf). Celtic went both ways. I think it is interesting that a mis-hearing of an uncommon word can lead to the same development today.

Both labial and velar consonants are [+grave] in the Jakobson and Halle system of distinctive features (they have more energy in the lower frequency range), as do the back vowel that immediately follows in both Pointon and Quinton, and this is taking priority over the compact vs diffuse feature that distinguishes labial and alveolar consonants - and high vowels (+compact) - from the velar consonants and low vowels (+diffuse).

This is the same feature that ventriloquists take advantage of when they say ‘gottle of geer’ for ‘bottle of beer’ to disguise the fact that it is they rather than their dummy that is speaking.

Lilli Lee asks if we can still order Peking Duck, or whether we now have to ask for Beijing Duck. Some names are fixed, and regardless of other changes in the language, they remain. Strangely, this has happened three times with phrases containing the word duck: we can still order Peking Duck and Bombay Duck (not Mumbai Duck), and the species of duck known as the Muscovy Duck has not changed its name to Moscow Duck.

The Bombay Stock Exchange has not changed its name either, and I don’t see any suggestion that the Indian film industry should become known as Mollywood instead of Bollywood.

We now travel to Livorno instead of Leghorn, but leghorn is still a breed of chicken, and a type of straw hat.

A letter in the Independent newspaper last week (Wednesday 21 November), from Shirin Tata of London, explained the spelling and pronunciation of Peking as ‘a close approximation to the Cantonese name for the city (”puck-ing” with a hard “p”)’. This came about, the writer says, because early contacts between Europe and China were with traders and seamen from the south of China, and the Europeans copied their pronunciation for place names. This explanation is similar to that for the origin of the English name for Livorno in Italy: Leghorn (now obsolete), which is a close approximation to the local dialectal form for the name: Ligorno.

However, I have a different explanation for Peking: some of the earliest European travellers to China were Jesuit priests - the first dictionary of Chinese for Europeans was written by Jesuits - and as these would mainly be from southern European countries and speaking Romance languages, they would have transcribed what they heard in terms of their own languages, whether French, Spanish, Italian or Portuguese. In all these languages, the voiceless plosives (/p. t. k/) are unaspirated, unlike the English equivalents. As the initial consonant of the Mandarin name for Peking is also unaspirated, the priests will have written down a ‘p’. The following vowel (or diphthong) is, or at least starts as, a half close front vowel, and the spelling convention for this in all the Western Romance languages is ‘e’ (or ‘é’ in French). The next consonant is also unaspirated, but pronounced in the palatal area, auditorily closest to the sound represented in European languages by a ‘k’ when it occurs before a front vowel, as in this case. The final velar nasal is a sound that occurs only allophonically in French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, so again, the nearest sound was used: [n]. This gives us the French version of the name Pékin, borrowed into English (the spelling ‘Pekin’ was common at one time).

I find this more satisfactory as an explanation than that of Shirin Tata, as it accounts for the initial ‘p’ in the English - and general European - spelling. Both the Cantonese and Mandarin pronunciations have what Shirin describes as a ‘hard’ p - in other words, an unaspirated sound, which is far more similar to English /b/ than it is to English /p/.

Abdul is right in his comment on “Kofi Annan and Edward Stourton”: the news readers can’t deal with the sounds and phonotactics of other languages - and the Pronunciation Research Unit doesn’t expect them to. As he points out, the syllable-final -h of the name Fahmi can have two solutions: ignore it, and say /fa:mi/, or replace it with /x/ as in “loch” or “Bach”. This is the practice followed by all languages when borrowing: use the nearest sounds of your own language in order to approximate the sounds of the borrowed word. Professor John Wells is discussing this problem in relation to English loan-words in Japanese on his blog at the moment.
In an earlier post, I was critical of Mishal Husain precisely because she does not follow this practice when it is a question of a name from a language she knows intimately. When she is speaking English, she should not introduce “foreign” sounds - it is disconcerting to the listener.

When Mr Annan was appointed as Secretary General of the United Nations, we in the BBC’s Pronunciation Research Unit were sent a tape of his inauguration, in the course of which he had to pronounce his own name. He clearly said “I, KOHfi ANNann” (re-spelt to show where he placed the stresses: -oh as in ‘ohm’). Consequently, this was the recommendation that the Unit made to the Corporation’s broadcasting staff, and so far as I am aware, and judging by the Radio 4 newsreaders’ pronunciation, this is still the recommendation today, available to every BBC employee, whether staff or freelance, via their desktop. Nevertheless, yet again this morning, he has been interviewed live on Radio 4, and introduced as “KOHfi aNANN” by Edward Stourton. This is the man who when he first joined the BBC from ITN had us informed that as a linguist, he had no need of the help of the Pronunciation Research Unit, and could we please stop sending him notes! He is the only news presenter in my experience who ever behaved in this way. Most of them have always been delighted to have the responsibility taken off their hands.

It ill behoves a man whose own name is pronounced in an opaque manner (STURton, not as written) to believe that he can say anyone else’s name without help. The very fact that he could think of telling us he was a linguist and didn’t need help proved (a) that he is no linguist, and (b) that he needs lots of help.

What is it about Spanish names that sports commentators can never get them right? For the past four days, not a single BBC sports reporter or commentator has pronounced Sergio García’s first name correctly (let’s leave aside for the moment whether the second name ’should be’ garssee-a or garthee-a). They seem to have no problem with the name José - the first sound doesn’t come out as a full-bodied velar fricative, but there is an attempt at it - so why have they decided that Sr García’s first name is Italian? Inevitably, they don’t even get it really right as an Italian name either, saying ’serji-o’ rather than ’sairjo’, but can the golfer really want them to say it that way? Brian Perkins, the incomparable Radio 4 newsreader, is the only broadcaster I’ve heard all week end pronounce it in a Spanish manner. He ought to live up to his “Dead Ringers” reputation, and deal severely with the sports people! (more…)

In the days before most people were literate, there were only two ways to pronounce a foreign place name - you either pronounced it more or less how the locals pronounced it, or you ignored their name and gave the place/river/mountain/whatever a name of your own.

This meant we said Paris as ‘parriss’ and Lyon as ‘lions’ (like more than one of the animals). This is because in early medieval French, Paris was pronounced in French as ‘parreess’, and Lyon as ‘lyonss’ (-y as a consonant, not a vowel). In the course of time, final -s disappeared from French pronunciation, but not from English (I’m talking 12th-13 Century here), but by this time, the names were so familiar to English speakers that they had become English words and started to develop according to English rules rather than French. (more…)

The approaching tenth anniversary of Diana, Princess of Wales’s death brings Althorp back into the news. This is where she grew up, and where she is buried. The BBC first became aware of the difficulty about pronunciation well before the Second World War - Broadcast English II, published in 1930, included it, with the pronunciation áwltrŏp. Later, in about 1952, the Pronunciation Assistant, G.M. “Elizabeth” Miller, wrote to the then Viscount Althorp (Diana’s father) about it, and was told the same thing. I, as Pronunciation Adviser, wrote to the present Earl Spencer (Diana’s brother) in 1992, and in January the following year, he wrote back saying “áwltrŏp. This is definitely correct. I can remember my grandfather pronouncing it like this; my octogenarian great-aunt does, too - and it is clear that alternative pronunciations only came about recently, out of laziness (it became simpler not to correct the many who mispronounce it - the majority of whom were foreign visitors to the house.)” See here for more on the argument. He included the same pronunciation in his history of Althorp

However, some time after this, he succumbed to the pressure, and put out a press statement saying that henceforth the house should be called ‘áwlthorp’ - as spelt.