Pronunciation (was Re: Thicknesse)

[Geoff Bannister]

Geoff:
Having read through the thread on pronunciation, I am coming to 
the conclusion that the problems seem to be mainly arising in local 
varieties of US English.

Just to present my credentials, I am a native UK English speaker 
and have personally spoken with two accents in my life and now 
live in the West Country which has its own set of dialects.

As a child, I lived in the North of England and grew up using a 
Lancashire accent. At the age of 9, I moved to London where I 
came in contact with, first of all, Cockney. Some of the guys in 
my Junior school and myself spoke `at' each other for the first 
two weeks or so until translation powers developed. :-)

Later, at grammar school, I tried to resist the attempts of one 
of the English teachers who tried to make me speak "proper" 
and get rid of my Northern accent. I resented his interference 
but, ultimately, the result of living in the south and going to a 
grammar school is that I acquired and still speak with (probably)
a middle class southern accent. I asked someone the other day 
"What accent do you think I have?" and I got the reply "South-
eastern, I would say". People who know me well can still pick 
up residual traces of the north but I suppose I speak what has 
more recently been tagged as "Estuary English" which is now 
used to define the accent which has developed around London 
and along the Thames Valley.

I do not know of any English accent which would pronounce
"merry", "marry" and "Mary" to sound the same. Likewise "oil" 
and "all". There has been a supposedly funny version of the 
books in circulation, involving the adventures of "Hairy Potter 
and the
." but this is definitely NOT a homophone of Harry 
in UK English.

Returning to dear old serious Sirius, one interesting fact is 
that, when I talk to the young folk at church and some of the 
grown ups who are also readers, "Sirius" is always pronounced 
as I have suggested – with a short "i" rhyming with "sit" or "pit". 
This may be partly explained by it being the pronunciation used 
by the actors in the films. There is also a possible further 
explanation in that Sirius is a star and there is a long running 
BBC programme "The Stars at Night" which has always been 
watched by a surprisingly large audience who will have picked 
up the pronunciation of the star's name over the years and it 
has been disseminated by viewers to other interested folk so it
is not such an unusual name as might be first thought by folk 
outside the UK.