Re: Potentially mispronounced station names

On Mon, 29 Dec 2008 03:46:48 -0800 (PST), Paul Oter put finger to
keyboard and typed:

On 29 Dec, 00:01, "Jack Taylor" <J...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Mortimer wrote:
"Chris Read" <chris...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:FbqdncfawMZ0ZMrUnZ2dnUVZ8v6dnZ2d@xxxxxxxxx
Wymondham, obviously, can provide hours of fun for all the family,
but thankfully (in this context) the railway no longer operate to
Snettisham or Hunstanton, as Betjeman is no longer around to put
people right.

Is there still only one correct Betjeman-like pronunciation for
Hunstanton? I think most of the people I've heard referring to it in
recent years have pronounced it as it is spelled. What was Betjeman's
pronunciation? Hunston, without the middle syllable?

Hun'ston and Snet'sham are (allegedly) the local pronunciations - although,
having holidayed in the former for most of my childhood and early teenage
years, I never did hear anyone local pronounce it anything other than
Hunstanton, apart from my father's friend, who was rather pretentious anyway
(and not a local)!

"Snet'sham" is simply a typical Norfolk dialect elision of
"Snettisham" - the "tt" sound becomes a glottal stop (as in "bu'er"
for "butter") and the following vowel is compressed. But people from
the region would still say that Snettisham is pronounced as it's
spelled, it's just that the local dialect makes it sound different to
how it would be pronounced by someone from elsewhere. That's as
opposed to, say, Wymondham, which even locals would tell you is
pronounced differently to the way it's spelled.

"Hun'ston" is a bit of an oddity. Like "Snet'sham", it's a dialectal
compression of the name as spelled. But what makes it odd is that
residents of the town itself don't have a particularly strong Norfolk
accent (not by comparison with the rest of the county, anyway), and
therefore don't contract the name in the same way. So residents of the
town say "Hunstanton", while the rest of Norfolk usually says
"Hun'ston".

Just south of King's Lynn is Watlington on the Fen line. I can
remember when Watlington station was called Magdalene Road (it was
renamed in 1989). How was that pronounced? The same as Magdalene
Street Norwich ("Mag-dallin")? or the same as Magdalene Street
Cambridge ("Maudlin")? I have a vague memory that the station
announcers at Cambridge said "Mag-dallin" .

It's "Mag-dallin", or "Mag-da-leen" (ie, pronounced in the same way as
Mary Magdalene, from whom the name is taken). There are plenty of
Magdalene Roads and Streets in England, most of which are pronounced
like the eponymous saint. The Cambridge (and, for that matter, Oxford)
pronunciation is the odd one out in this case. Having said that, the
Cambridge and Oxford pronunciation is historically based - at the time
that Magdalene College (in Cambridge) and Magdalen College (in Oxford)
were founded, a "g" before another consonant (as in Magdalen[e]) was
silent in normal English pronunciation (a bit like it still is in
"thought", for example) and a vowel before a "g" was long, leading to
a basic pronunciation of "maud-a-lin" which itself got contracted to
"maudlin". The colleges kept the archaic pronunciation even after the
rest of the language had moved on. Ironically, though, the more
phonetic pronunciation of "Mag-dallin" is closer to the original Greek
from whence the name originates.

Mark
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