Over the last couple of weeks, the name of the tragic child James Bulger has come back into the news after nearly twenty years, because one of his killers, Jon Venables, has been found guilty of child pornography crimes.

As a result, we have been hearing two pronunciations of the name Bulger – /ˈbʌldʒə/ and /ˈbʊldʒə/. The obvious question is – which of these is ‘correct’? The answer has to be, both or neither.

James Bulger lived his short life in the North West of England, where the STRUT-FOOT split never happened. As I’ve mentioned before, here, most speakers of the split accents believe that for non-splitters, it is the FOOT vowel that is consistently used (for instance, they characterise ‘mushy peas’ as being pronounced /ˈmʊʃi/, while the split pronunciation is /ˈmʌʃi/). You would therefore expect splitters to pronounce Bulger as /ˈbʊldʒə/. But the word bulge has /bʌldʒ/, from which splitters might extrapolate /ˈbʌldʒə/ for the name.

So, splitters may use either version and be arguably correct, but the local pronunciation of the name in Merseyside would be more like /ˈbɔldʒə/, the /ɔ/ representing a short THOUGHT vowel.

I’ve just been listening to “In Our Time” on BBC Radio 4 (the latest one available as a podcast, 22 April 2010), and was struck yet again how inconsistent English speakers are in their treatment of Latin names. The discussion was about Roman satirists, and was between Melvyn Bragg (of course) and three professors who may be expected to have a thorough understanding of Latin: Mary Beard (Professor of Classics at Cambridge University), Denis Feeney (Professor of Classics and Giger Professor of Latin at Princeton University) and Duncan Kennedy (Professor of Latin Literature and the Theory of Criticism at the University of Bristol).

Nevertheless, their pronunciation was inconsistent. All three pronounced Maecenas as /maɪˈsiːnæs/ (with occasional reduction of the final vowel to schwa), which is neither traditional English (/miːˈsiːnæs/) nor an adaptation of Classical Latin (/maɪˈkeɪnæs/). One of the two men astonishingly spoke of the battle of /faɪˈlɪpaɪ/, which bears no relation to either the Classical Latin pronunciation or the traditional anglicisation. On the other hand, all the participants in the programme spoke of Lucilius as /lʊˈsaɪljəs/, which includes the traditional English treatment of the (long) stressed vowel.

There is obviously total confusion in the minds of native English speakers over the way in which they should pronounce Latin names, even those that have been used in English for many years – and even among the Classics community. My view is that the reformed pronunciation introduced into schools in the mid-nineteenth century, and the influence of the Roman Catholic church in propagating the Italianate pronunciation, are the reasons for this.

I wonder if the same confusion exists in other European languages?

As a footnote, for anyone interested, the whole series of “In Our Time” is now available on the BBC website, going back to October 1998.

I notice that BBC Radio 4 announcers regularly pronounce Ms O’Leary’s family name as /əʊˈlɛəri/. I suppose from her accent that this is what she calls herself, but I’m wondering if following suit when one does not have an Irish accent is mimicking her rather than representing her name in ‘neutral’ terms. For those unfamiliar with Radio 4’s output, Olivia O’Leary is the presenter of “Between Ourselves”, a discussion programme that deals with a single issue in each edition.

To start from a different example. True to my roots, I pronounce bath with the TRAP vowel (as John Wells says in Accents of English, it would seem a denial of my northernness to change this). A friend of mine comes from the City of Bath, and he insists that I am mispronouncing his city. On the other hand, he pronounces Newcastle with the same BATH vowel (not a good key word in this discussion!), regardless of the fact that most Novocastrians from either Newcastle upon Tyne or Newcastle under Lyme will use the TRAP vowel. In my view, he is right to say /…’kɑːsl/ and I am right to say /bæθ/ – both in the terms of our own accents.

To return to Ms O’Leary. In her accent, I assume she calls King Lear /lɛər/. Certainly, when the Short Brothers Lear Fan Jet plane was in the news, Northern Irish commentators called it the /lɛər fɑːn/, but this did not persuade others to pronounce it in the same way. In my view, Ms O’Leary should be pronounced /əʊˈlɪəri/ by the announcers from other parts of the UK. By trying too hard to get a close approximation to her own pronunciation, they might appear to be simply making fun of it (and by extension, her).

The main railway station in Edinburgh is named after the first of Walter Scott’s novels, which he published anonymously. The pronunciation known to everyone and contradicted nowhere is /ˈweɪvərli/, but is this really what Scott intended?

There are certain characters whose dialogue is rendered in a – fairly inconsistent – attempt at Scots. Most of them are portrayed as saying Waverley without any indication of what vowel sound they are using in the stressed syllable. Two, however – Bailie Macwheeble and Janet Gellatley – regularly pronounce the name “Wauverley”.

Is this an attempt to imitate a broad Scots version of a different pronunciation from the one we all know? Did Scott think of his hero as being pronounced /ˈwævərli/, or /ˈwɑːvərli/ (which in many Scots accents are neutralized)? Or alternatively /ˈwɒvərli/, which could then be rendered as ‘Wauverley’, /ɒ/ and /ɔː/ being also neutralized for many Scots.

Just a thought.

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.

I’ve been rather disappointed by the BBC since Christmas Day over the attempted bombing of an airliner approaching Detroit airport. For at least the first week, there was absolutely no consistency among even radio newsreaders in the pronunciation of the suspect’s name. Stress on the last element varied between Abdul’mutallab and Abdulmu’tallab.

Christmas Day is the worst day of the year for such a story to break, because there is noone in the Pronunciation Unit office, but for the uncertainty to last for a week is very unusual. There is a particular problem with this name, because although the individual names are Moslem ones, of Arabic origin, the bearer of them is a Nigerian, and so may not be a native Arabic speaker, although according to Wikipedia, he was a student of Arabic, and his mother is a Yemeni. The major language of the Moslem faith area of Nigeria is Hausa, but this may not be his first language either. The BBC does have a Hausa Section at Bush House who could be asked for information, and when I was the Pronunciation Adviser, my home telephone number was easily found throughout the Corporation in case of difficulty 24 hours a day (there was one occasion when I was rung at 3 am). I don’t imagine that any of the current members of the Unit have their numbers available in this way, and their manager, whose number may be accessible, would not be able to help, as he is not a linguist. I would have had to do some research to establish the best way to deal with the name, but the advantage of contacting me was that my advice would have been immediately available to the whole Corporation, whereas research by a newsreader, while it might well have been as good, would have been known to that newsreader’s immediate colleagues only, and not the wider broadcasting world.

Here is a plea by some American news people for a simplification of difficult names. Is that reasonable, or a cop out?

T Morris, in a comment to this post, asks why there are no English ‘translations’ of French place names, such as there are in other languages (Parigi in Italian) or as there are for English names in other languages (Rome rather than Roma).

In fact, there are English spellings of French place names that differ from the French originals, but they seem to be reducing in number over the years. We used always to write Lyons and Marseilles for Lyon and Marseille, and going further back in history, Calais used to be written as Calice. ‘The Jackdaw of Rheims‘ (one of the best-known Ingoldsby Legends) provides another example. As a (very) small child, I imagined that Dunkirk must be in Scotland, and Ushant never seemed to me to refer to a place in France (I think it is now usually seen in its French spelling – Ouessant).

The same thing is happening with other foreign place names – Saragossa is now usually Zaragoza, and Corunna has become La Coruña. As we travel more, we become aware that our spelling and pronunciation of foreign place names has got out of step with the native, and we adjust our version to make it more similar to the original. With spelling that is easy, but the pronunciation will still be an approximation, better or worse according to our individual ability to imitate, or willingness to do so. The changes take place particularly for those place names that have dropped out of our consciousness, and then come back to us – Flushing became Vlissingen when car ferries started to use the port more regularly, and Leghorn became Livorno when it became an easily accessible tourist resort.

The regions of France still retain their English names – Brittany, Normandy, Burgundy, Gascony show no signs of becoming Bretagne, Normandie, Bourgogne or Gascogne.

If we turn the question around, it seems odd that the French have so few spellings of their own for place names in the British Isles – after all, (Norman) French was the language of government in England for about three hundred years. I can find a handful – Londres, Douvres, Cantorbéry, Edimbourg, Cornouailles, Tamise (the Thames), and the names of the constituent parts of the islands – Angleterre, Ecosse, Pays de Galles, and Irlande, plus Grande Bretagne itself. The French pronunciation of English place names without different spellings is, however, just as gallicized as our pronunciation of French names is anglicized – as is to be expected.

Throughout the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and for some years afterwards, the Square of the Gate of Heavenly Peace was frequently mentioned in the news.

Then at the time of the student democracy protests in 1989, with no explanation that I can remember, we were told that they were concentrated in Tiananmen Square (which most people had great difficulty in pronouncing). It was only some time later that I realized that these two names referred to the same place (I know nothing of Chinese apart from how to anglicize its pronunciation).

The New China News Agency had already decided that from January 1979 all Chinese names would henceforth be reported by them in their Pinyin spellings, and this has gradually filtered through to all English news reports, although in 1989 we were still hearing about Peking rather than Beijing, but this doesn’t seem to me a reason for a translation of a place name to be abandoned in favour of an incomprehensible Chinese name. Could it have had anything to do with the contradiction between its name and the actions of the Chinese government?

For the record, Tiananmen has three syllables, and is most accurately anglicized as /’tjɛn æn mən/ with all four nasals clearly articulated.

This BBC programme about Henry Purcell is available on line for the next couple of weeks. In it Charles Hazlewood claims that we know so little about the composer that we are not even sure how to pronounce his name.

It is true that many people (including Mr Hazlewood in this film – although he is not consistent) stress the family name on the second syllable, but all the evidence points to this being wrong.

Dryden, a good friend of the composer, wrote an Ode on the death of Mr Henry Purcell, in which the name appears twice. On both occasions, the metre of the line demands that the name be stressed on the first syllable: “So ceas’d the rival Crew when Purcell came” and “The Gods are pleas’d alone with Purcell’s Lays”. Similarly, and two centuries later, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a sonnet to Purcell, the first quatrain of which is:

Have, fair fallen, O fair, fair have fallen, so dear
To me, so arch-especial a spirit as heaves in Henry Purcell,
An age is now since passed, since parted; with the reversal
Of the outward sentence low lays him, listed to a heresy, here.

Better even than these examples is the evidence of contemporary spellings of the name: John Evelyn’s Diary has the spelling ‘Pursal’ or ‘Purcel’ (30 May 1698 – different editors have the different spellings); Henry ‘Persill’ appears as a member of the cast of “The Siege of Rhodes” (1656); Henry ‘Pursall’ in the Will of John Hingston (12 December 1683). The variation in the spellings of the second syllable indicate that this cannot have been the stressed syllable.

Americans frequently stress Andrew Marvell’s name on the second syllable and (in my experience at least) always stress Lawrence and Gerald Durrell in the same way, although I have never yet heard anyone British make this mistake.

Perhaps Purcell started to be stressed on the second syllable when Unilever started to market ‘Persil’ washing powder in the UK, in 1909.

Colombia is a country in the extreme north of South America, pronounced with the second syllable like the surname of the actor Herbert Lom.

British Columbia is a province of Canada, and the District of Columbia is where the US capital city is to be found. These are both pronounced with the second syllable like the Scottish word for a chimney – lum.

However, the capital of Sri Lanka is spelt with -o- like the South American country, but pronounced as if spelt like the Canadian province and American District.

No wonder they are so often confused.