Gillywater

[Geoff Bannister]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "zanooda2" <zanooda2 at ...> wrote:
>
> --- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "Lee Storm \(God Is The Healing 
> Force\)" <n2fgc@> wrote:
> 
> > I mean the G is hard like Gill, Girl, Garlic.  The word is 
> > pronounced with this hard G in all the references to Gillywater 
> > in the Jim Dale versions and, if I recall coorectly, in the 
> > Stephen Fry versions, too.
> 
> 
> zanooda:
> 
> Well, it's not the flower then :-). Thanks!

Geoff:
The syllable "GIll" is an interesting one in terms of hard or soft 
pronunciation. The girl's name Gillian has a soft "g" - which gives 
rise to the variant spelling "Jill" and there is an old volume 
measurement "gill" = half a pint which is soft.

The oddest one is that there are two towns of Gillingham, one in Kent 
and the other in Dorset. The former has a soft "g", the latter hard.