Fossils fuelling phonetics
If you think languages are about rules, then try pronouncing the English village of Happisburgh in Norfolk– chances are the locals won’t be happy. It’s pronounced “Hayzbrur”.
Welcome to the peculiar world where spelling and sound maintain only a distant acquaintance, nodding to each other across centuries of linguistic drift.
In any language, phonetics has always been a headscratcher, except for the natives. Fundamentally, a language is pure phonetics, because human natural language is transmitted orally and has been for most of its existence. Writing came late to the game, artificial languages (such as post-classical Latin or code-based mathematical notation or programming languages) even later. That’s ‘yesterday’, at psychotechnological-evolutionary scale.
Phonetical practice has three identifiable sources, each related to one another: rules, etymology and shared norms. Rules work most of the time, etymology trumps rules, and shared norms trumps everything else.
The rules might say that Happisburgh should be pronounced like a happy Chris de Burgh. But etymology tells a different story. Norfolk was once divided into administrative areas called hundreds, and Happisburgh sat within the hundred of Happing. The offshore sandbanks kept this pronunciation alive as Haisborough. When the lightvessel was established in 1832, its name was shortened to HAISBRO – perhaps because painting the full name on each side proved too onerous a task. The lightvessel became known as HAISBRO while the village lighthouses retained HAPPISBURGH. Different spellings ensured correct stores reached correct stations, though requisition chits at Happisburgh Lighthouse still bear “the Lighthouse, Hasbro, Stalham.” The shared norm, as above, follows what locals say, regardless of rules or etymology, though the practice evolved by suppressing the former and following the latter.
Leicester suffers similar indignities. “Lester” to those who know. Gloucester becomes “Gloster.” Worcester transforms into “Wooster.” These ancient names carry Anglo-Saxon and Norman roots now shrouded in mystery and quasi-oblivion. The original meanings eroded, pronunciation compressed through generations of hurried speech. Towcester, Bicester, Cirencester – all ending in that peculiar “ster” sound that swallows syllables whole (from the Latin ‘castrum’, as in ‘Chester’ winking back to the Roman occupation of Britain).
The written forms preserve medieval spellings while spoken language races ahead, leaving etymology as fossilized evidence of linguistic evolution.