Before we get to Stoughton, let's look at how to pronounce Canton, because it's simpler yet similar. It's not Can-tun, it's Cant'n. It almost sounds like the vowel is dropped. Now if you say the letter "n" by itself, it sounds like "in" or "inn," but I don't think we say Cant'in in that example. So, on to Stoughton. As pointed out in the stream, it's not stout-un. It's Stoe-tun, or Stow'tn. Now if you say "tn," it sounds like "tin," but I hadn't noticed anyone saying Stow'tin until today on the stream. Now, accents vary in Massachusetts, depending on exactly where you're from. Boston could be Bos-tun, or (what I tend to say,) Bah-stun, or Bah-stin. So, there's a case for an "uh" slipping to an "ih" sound, but I probably wouldn't advise anyone who's trying to learn how to pronounce Stoughton to emphasize an "i" sound. (As an aside, my accent can surprisingly change in the same sentence, even mid-word. If you know the expression, "park the car in Harvard Yard," if I slip, I'll end up saying "Park the car in Harvahd Yahd.")
I would agree that Stoe'tn would probably be the best approximation of it. At this point I've said it out loud enough times today that I can't tell what I would say naturally. I think if I were to give directions to someone from another country I would probably pronounce it closer to Stoe-ton for clarity.
Having grown up in the next town over, it is indeed pronounced “Stoe’tn.” I’m so glad someone was on the stream to correct Matt’s pronunciation as it was driving me nuts. What I couldn’t figure out was how he mispronounced Stoughton, but managed to pronounce Worcester correctly, given that it’s the most mispronounced town name by folks not from New England. Knowing now that his wife is from Concord, it all makes perfect sense. Cheers, Matt!!
You'd hope an English person would pronounce Worcester correctly regardless of where their partner was from... Although the question would then be, is Stoughton in the UK (no doubt there is at least one, just about every New England town is naturally named after one in the home country) pronounced the same as the one in MA? And if it is, is the UK one well known or a tiny blip on a map no-one has heard of (unlike Worcester)
One would think. That said, there are a lot of folks in the US outside of New England who, more often than not, try to pronounce it phonetically. I'm pretty sure that in the UK, they pronounce it "Wooster" whereas in eastern MA, it's generally pronounced "whoostah." As FeralKitty mentioned, there's a lot of variation in Massachusetts accents, depending on what part of the state you're from. You're right about there being a Stoughton in the UK though, so perhaps Matt was pronouncing it the way they do there. Thanks for Playing!
My understanding is that the MA Worcester and UK Worcester are essentially pronounced the same, just with slightly different sounds due to local accents. The "-cester" name is pretty consistent in the UK (Gloucester - Gloster, Leicester - Lester etc, just don't mention Cirencester...)
Well not coming from that area being a Londoner by birth and a southerner for over 35 years, I pronounce ought as awt ... so always thought it was staw ton. Seems I'm the only one.
My wife also lived in Worcester for a bit so I've heard her and her mum talking about it including in her mums rich Boston accent - neither have ever said Stoughton "Loughton" in the UK is pronounced "Low-tun" for comparison
There's a Stoughton not far from me in the UK and we pronounce it 'Stow-tun'. Could be different across the pond though.
There is a Stoughton in Leicestershire and West Sussex, the ton should be pronounced as it looks. Ton in old English means town, Stough was probably a river I imagine or a derivation of the name of a river or some other landmark.
The Edinburgh one winds me up way too much. My pals always purposefully pronounce it to get me to crack up. (This bit is more in general, i.e. not really part of the reply) But I think the real question everyone wants an awnser to is, how do you pronounce Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch?
You definitely don’t pronounce it the way the ‘helpful’ pronunciation guide on the station sign says so. I won’t link the picture as it makes me shiver inside every time I see it.
Pronunciation would vary depending on whether the speaker is from North or South Wales. Here is a link - speaker in the link has a North accent (which makes sense, since LlanfairPG is on the Holyhead route) https://llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.co.uk/say.php
There's no guarantee that American locals pronounce English-derived placenames 'correctly.' For example, here Westmoreland County is pronounced WestMOREland, not WESTmorlun.
Pfhh!! It's pronounced exactly as it's spelt. How else? Geesh! Trust me when I tell ya, these days there's no guarantee that Americans pronounce anything correctly!! There are places in the south where I've come close to hiring a translator.
True, dat. Welsh is a phonetic language (as is Spanish) - if you can spell it, you can say it. You just have to know the different (from English) pronunciation values, mainly the double letters and the vowels.
May I be the first here to suggest Stufft'n as a hilariously wrong yet completely reasonable (ie Loughborough) option? I think going through all the different possible variations that -ough has in English, there will be the following (with the -ough example from other words): Stuff-t'n - rough, tough Stoff-t'n (like off) - cough, trough Stoe-t'n (like the toe on your foot) - dough, though Stow-t'n (like cow) - plough, drought Store-t'n - thought Stoo-t'n - through
Down the road from me is the village of Stourton and that is often pronounced Storeton! Yet Stourbridge is never pronounced Storebridge! Although I think in the middle ages it was called Sturbridge!
Blackcountry folk pronounces it differently to us Brummies, they even pronounce road as rowud and Can't as cor and down as dowen. Ah the richness of regional accents.
According to my OS places database there are three places in Great Britain called Stoughton: one each in West Sussex, Leicestershire and Surrey.
Already looking forward to the how to pronounce Radebeul-Kötzschenbroda Thread for BRD :P I pronounced Stoughton like Matt did in the announcement streams. (I dont have a clue on how to write it so that the pronounciation comes across.) But Pronounciation of english names/citys is truely something else:
I remember when I lived in Eastbourne and a short way across the coast towards Brighton is a place spelt Seaford. I used to pronounce it with the emphasis on the first syllable - SEA ford .... but the locals apparently *detest* that ... they say it's seaFORD. At the end of the day does it really matter as long as you get there?!
I had a teacher once who had a really hard time with English place names. Trafalgar was one of her "favorites" along with any places ending in "shire" (which most of us pronounce "shyer").
Ironic as Trafalgar is a Spanish place name of Arabic origin! Yeah, the pronunciation of 'shire' is a good example. When in Scotland you usually hear 'shyer', but here in Southern England it's almost always 'sheer'.
I remember as a kid hearing Americans trying to pronounce the Town Bicester, they would break it down to 'Bi-ces- ter' where it should be 'Biss-ter' . I love listening to Brummies talk, they tend to 'sing' with some of their words . I also remember a couple of Welsh girls pronouncing 'Slough'. They would say 'Sloff' instead of well 'Slough' lol. And I'm the first to admit I am useless when it comes to pronouncing words myself. Stoughton would be 'Stowton' to me.
Place name pronunciations can change quite rapidly, particularly if there's been an influx of outsiders. Two of the towns near me are Beaconsfield and Chesham. The former is pronounced Beck- by 90% of the people who live there, but those over 60, who've lived there all their lives, pronounce it Beak-. Similarly Chesham is pronounced with a 'sh' sound by most, but original inhabitants say Chess-ham (town on the River Chess). Nobody (not even locals) can agree whether Shrewsbury has an 'e' or an 'o' sound.
There seems to be a few places, certainly in England, that suffer from this. There is a town not far from me called 'Didcot' and a few centuries ago it was 'Didcote' but older people in the area pronounced it 'Didcut' and people outside the town pronounced it 'Didcut' also, even when the town was spoken on TV it was 'Didcut' used to do my head in. I lived there for a while and went to school there but everyone said 'Did-COT'. I think the 'Didcut' has its roots when the town used to be in Berkshire. Berkshire is another one people get wrong, lol.
One thing that does need to be taken in to consideration is, just how do we know exactly how things were pronounced before audio recordings were invented? Sure there would have been a bit of word-of-mouth or "back-when-I-was-young-we-didn't-have-those-new-fandangled-phonomographamawatsits-sonnyjim", but at some point you have to assume that (just like Latin), no-one knows for certain what old English etc sounded like. Combine that with people reading old texts (which may or may not have been written in the original alphabet) but pronouncing things like how they would if they were literally transcribed letter for letter in modern English ("ye olde shoppe" is meant to be "the old shop", not "yee oldie shoppie" for instance)
Victorian dialect researchers made ample use of phonetic alphabets, which were invented in the early 1800s. We actually have a pretty good record of how place-names and local dialect words were pronounced in the 19th century. Before that one gets into philology or historical linguistics, the study of sound-shifts over time. This is a remarkably accurate science, because sound-shifts are astonishingly regular. This is how we know how, for instance, Shakespeare's plays were pronounced in his day (rather West Country to modern ears). (Orthography, the "Yee Oldie Tea Shoppie" stuff, is a somewhat different study. As soon as you realize that the "Y" was actually the Old English letter "thorn" (pr. TH), and that silent final Es are nothing new in English, then it falls into place) Pop quiz: why is the surname Menzies pronounced "Mingus?"
Because the "z" wasn't a z, it was a yogh (I just recently re-watched The Imitation Game so this is fresh in my mind). Dalziel was another one I heard growing up (watching Dalziel and Pascoe), actually DEE-el This is really only still prevalent in Scotland though, most other places around the world have adopted the 'z' pronunciation
Blame the Anglo-Saxons and the fall of the Roman empire certainly for the end of its use in Britain. It was still being used in churches until relatively recently.
Far less than, say, the French-speaking community. When the Anglo-Saxons became Christianized naturally their monks and scribes adopted the Latin alphabet together with the language. However, England had a vernacular literary culture earlier than in most places, and written Old English, a language which had certain sounds not found in Latin, looked back to its native "runic" or futhorc alphabet to fill in the gaps. Hence the preservation of the futhorc letters thorn, eth, yogh and wynn until well into the Middle English period. These all disappeared more or less with the rise of printing, since most early typesets in England were imported from Germany or Italy.
A slightly different problem in pronunciation occurs in Welsh - there is no easy way to know whether a noun is male or female in welsh, which creates issues because the language is a mutated language - i.e. the word spelling and/or pronunciation changes depending on a series of rules, one of which is the gender of the word (6 mutations!). So welsh words are typically learnt together with the gender-dependent definitive article, so you know the gender.
Hiro Protagonist, we do indeed have a very good idea what Old English would sound like. It is still spoken and taught for one but Friesland in the Netherlands has a dialect very closely matched to Old English, so close they can understand each other in conversation which would sense as Friesland was on the route for Angles and Saxons onto England (Aenglaland).