The pronunciation of "Gloucester" (gloster) and "Leicester" (lester) follow a similar scheme for the "-cester" bit which leads to "Worcester" being pronounced "wooster", but Worcestershire sauce is often pronounced "wooster sauce" which doesn't make much sense.
Apparently, Frome in Somerset is one of the hardest place names to pronounce in England, though it certainly doesn't compare to some Welsh towns. (I say it as "froom")
I think the sauce is either Worcestershire Sauce, or Worcester Sauce, either is acceptable.
Worcestershire and Worcester follow the same patter as Gloucestershire/Gloucester, Leicestershire/Leicester and (Towcestershire doesn't exist)/Towcester. Towcester, incidentally, being the same pronunciation as "toaster".
The one that annoys me is Cirencester, which is usually "sai-ren-ses-ta", and only occasionally "sai-ren-ster".
I like the Northamptonshire village of Cogenhoe, which is obviously pronounced cook-no.
It sits on the River Nene, which is pronounced Neen or Nen depending on which bit of Northamptonshire you live in (Northamptonshire is not very big...)
It amuses me when english words are pronounced differently to make them seem posher. We have a nearby town called Yate (rhymes with gate), but the posh version rhymes with latte.
"That's just incorrect. It's pronounced "wooster-shuh". The double-O is short, as in "book". Worcestershire Sauce is sometimes simply called "woosters", as in "a dash of woosters".
> Frome in Somerset is one of the hardest place names to pronounce
Hardly. It's pronounced "froom". That's not so hard.
>There’s a town in Massachusetts called Worcester, pronounced something like Wooster/Woostah/Woostuh.
And there's a Gloucester[0] (pronounced 'Gloster' or, more likely in MA 'Glostah') there as well. And there's one[1] in Virgnia too, (Wikipedia says it's pronounced 'Gloster', but I don't know the VA accent well enough to know if that's locally correct).
There are other similar place names around the US, mostly on the eastern seaboard, for obvious reasons, as well.
The pronunciation is what it is. The orthography is the problem.
(Many words place names long pre-date any kind of attempt to regularize English spelling, and in any case come from fusions of Brythonic, Norman, Roman, Norwegian etc languages. This is why it's difficult to predict the pronunciation of one word from the spelling of another.)
Maybe, but 'we can't provide logical rules for names acquired over a millennium ago' seems like a poor reason to say 'therefore we shouldn't apply consistent rules to recent conventions'.
Someone asked about physic ... well people used to use physick in [late medieval?] British English... but that's for what we might call medicine now.
Oh, defending the pronounciation is easy, because the problem is not with the pronounciation at all -- it's all about English language spelling not keeping pace with the changes with the pronounciation.
You start with a pinch of dyslexia and end with a bit of a lisp. Pretty straight forward when you imagine what it would sound like in a game of telephone between 10 5 year olds.
I mean this in the most genuinely curious and interested way possible.... but if you're doing geometry or trig... do you refer to it as "math" because you're just doing one type of mathematics? Is there every a point where it isn't plural. Is even 2+2=4 referred to as "maths".
I think its funny that terms like math v maths come about very organically and then after the fact everyone feels the need to back into a reasoning that was likely never there. Obviously neither are wrong because they are the "correct" way for a given dialect/region etc.
> Obviously neither are wrong because they are the "correct" way for a given dialect/region etc.
I would say "math" is an objectively better shortening of "mathematics" as it preserves the singular collective meaning than "maths" which preserves more of the incidental textual form.
Here in the UK, it's just called maths or mathematics and the term "math" is never used (or at least I can't think of an example).
I find it generally amusing to examine the differences between U.S. and British English and quite often get confused over whether I should be using "licence" or "license". It's the little quirks of language/spelling that make it interesting. (Though english, I'm a big fan of some of the U.S. contractions such as "y'all'd've")
>I think its funny that terms like math v maths come about very organically and then after the fact everyone feels the need to back into a reasoning that was likely never there. Obviously neither are wrong because they are the "correct" way for a given dialect/region etc.
We Americans use the phrase "do the math," which means to go figure something out, not necessarily arithmetically.
Is there a similar phrase for the Brits? As in "do the maths?" Which seems unlikely. As such, I'd expect those using British style English to have different phrase for the same thing. Is that the case? If so, what might it be?
> That's the only correct way of contracting "mathematics"
That's the correct way of doing it if you've naturally got a British accent (or really any accent where you clearly learned British English as a second language).
Americans saying 'maths' is like dragging fingernails down a chalkboard.
True, but it always comes off as sounding a bit pretentious to me since the social norm (as far back as I can remember) has been to simply refer to it as "math".
As an American who doesn't say "maths", my assumption is that algebra is one math, geometry is another, calculus is one, discrete math is one, etc. Together, they are "the maths."
Probably a "just so" definition to satisfy my American ears. I bet they'd say that any one of those is still "maths" by itself.