I used to work with a bloke with the surname 'Menzies'. He insisted on pronouncing it 'Mingus'.

Oz, your friend couldn't speak properly, it should be pronounced "mingis". With an 'i'.

There wis a young lassie named Menzies,
That asked her aunt whit this thenzies.
Said her aunt wi a gasp,
"Ma dear, it's a wasp,
An you're haudin the end whaur the stenzies!"

Which reminds me of a limerick about my home town:

There was a young curate from Salisbury
Whose manners were quite halisbury-scalisbury
He went down to Hampshire
But got ants in his pampshire
And now he's the Vicar of Walisbury.

My sister used to be a teacher in a 'special' school, one for children with learning difficulties. I am not quite sure if in this particular case the parents had a problem too but there was a child who used to speak of her baby brother who was called Gooey. The teacher thought that this was a nickname so asked what his proper name was, it was Gooey. Confused still, the teacher asked the child to write it down. Guy. They had seen it written and didn't realise that you didn't pronounce it phonetically.

How in gods name does Dalziel become Dee-ell.

It's simple really. Throatwarbler-Mangrove is pronounced Luxury-Yacht.
And Pittsburgh should be pronounced Pittsborough.
My friend in Hyde Park (NY) went to London to go to Hyde Park, and I went from Coventry (CT), but I didn't 'get sent to Coventry' (UK). Pure logic.

This one hurts. It should only ever be pronounced "PITTS-burg"...

The pronunciation of Dalziel has the same source as pronouncing Menzies as 'mingis'. Both are Scots names and contained a sound somewhere in between a soft 'g' or a 'y'. When these names were written in an older form of English they were spelt with a character known as 'yogh' - which disappeared when the modern English alphabet was adopted. The character looked more like a 'z' in the new alphabet so English spellings replaced the yogh with a z but pronunciation of the names stayed as before. The form of handwriting I use has a lower case z where the tail drops below the line - it looks very much like a yogh whereas the upper case version is written as Z.


Edited because the message preview let me use the proper yogh character but when I submitted it turned into gobbledygook.

Or it's pronounced like that just becuz 'tis.

Thanks flopsy. I always assumed Dalziel was French.

Dalziel is from the Gaelic; it means 'bright dale'. Menzies was however originally French but passed through Scots and came out the other side. Which leads me to wonder if that's where we modern Brits got the word 'minging' from but if there's anyone here called Menzies of course I didn't say that.

We also had a Prime Minister named Menzies. As far as I know, his name was pronounced as it is spelled. English really is a dopey language.

I've heard that Robert Menzies was sometimes called by the nickname Ming. Did that reflect the original Scottish pronunciation?

Tom, I believe you are quite correct. I was under the opinion that the 'Ming' nickname came from the 'Flash Gordon' comics, but I have been sadly mistaken for the last 50 years!

TabbyTom, he got the nickname "Ming the Merciless" early in his career as a not particularly complimentary one. He was also called "Pig iron Bob" for selling iron ore to the Japanese just in time for them to return it to us in bombs.

Looking further on the net I found you are correct. It is from the Scottish pronunciation of Menzies. The mercilous bit was for another reason.

While we're on the topic of dopey languages, here are some bits of Franglais which, despite the efforts of the Acadamie Francaise, seems to be taking hold across the ditch:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22636888

When I was living in New Brunswick the closest border crossing to the US was at St. Stephen (Canada) - Calais (Maine, USA). It drove me bonkers every time I heard the (correct US) pronunciation of Calais as "callous".

New Brunswick has a lot of place names that come from the native Mi'kmaq and Maliseet languages. Apohoqui ("AP-uh-hawk") was one I had trouble with especially, as I had grown up in an area known as Cataraqui ("Kat-a-ROCK-way"), from a local native dialect in southern Ontario.

"Callous" for "Calais." That's a new one to me; embarrassing, but funny all the same. I wonder if those Maine locals thought the Brits were mispronouncing the French city when the Channel Tunnel opened and it was all over the news?

"Callous" or "Callis" was the usual English-speakers' pronunciation of Calais in former times - probably down to Victorian days. So maybe the Mainers have just preserved the old pronunciation in local usage.

Love the link, flopsy, and can vouch that all the expressions cited are commonly heard in France, and have often made me smile (just not in front of the person/s using them)

Seems an age since 'le weekend' and une 'pique-nique'appeared. Back then we heard a lot about the French government disapproving of 'imported' words and expressions.Do they still try to ban them, Toni?

Au contraire, everybody here absolutely loves inserting as many franglais expressions into their speech as possible, and as mentioned in the article, it can be highly amusing to hear them use English words to say something that the words don't actually mean, and then defend themselves and their way of saying things. They do understand (and admire) each other's "English", mind you, it's just poor little Anglophone me that needs to ask them to translate it into proper French so that I can understand

If you stick an "e" on the end of a product you can add 20 percent to the price.

One thing that has always fascinated me is the Canadian and western USA pronunciation of 'o'. In these areas, 'o' is pronounced like the 'oo' in zoo' so the word 'out' sounds like 'oot'.

British people drop the 'er' in a word and replace it with 'ah.' Theater becomes 'the-a-tah'.

Ask for coke here and you get coca-cola; everything else is a soft drink. A grinder is a hoagie that has been heated in the over before serving.

Most people here pronounce congratulations as 'con-gra-chew-lay-shuns.

Some fractured English words are as follows:

Jeet? (Did you eat?)
No--jew? (No, did you?)

Can I just point out that "theer-tah" is spelt "-re" not "-er". No? OK