This week we’re going to start in Aberdeenshire and end with a doomsday scenario.
On a recent visit to Aberdeen I passed an A90 road sign pointing the way to what I imagine is a small village, Auquhirie. I have no idea how to pronounce “Auquhirie”.
Other Aberdeenshire place names have equally opaque sounds. Peterculter is Petercooter, Maryculter is Marycooter, but Cults is pronounced as it looks.
This is common. Place names in Britain often sound bizarrely different when spoken than they look written.
Frome is Froom, Alnwick is Annick, Trottiscliffe is Trozley. Gloucester, Leicester, and Towcester appear to lose syllables when spoken aloud. The River Thames should rhyme with “shames”, and Godmanchester (a wee place in Cambridgeshire) is seemingly Gumster.
Closer to home, Menzies is pronounced Meenis; Culross is Cooriss; Anstruther (to locals) is Ainster. Then, of course, there’s Friockheim. But let’s not go there.
Many appear to wilfully contravene the basic rules of English. It’s partly because place names have so many sources. There are Celtic names, Anglo-Saxon names, two types of Viking (Swedish and Danish), Roman, and Norman French, among others.
And I like all this. You learn the pronunciation quirks and foibles one by one. I think this makes our language rich, fascinating, and surprising. Finding out new things is living.
One day soon this will end. The reason will be the lazy shortcuts and pictograms that are replacing English. I might sound shrill, panicky, and a bit ridiculous (wouldn’t be the first time) but I think replacing words with pictograms is truly dangerous.
My place of work has just upgraded its internal messaging system. The new version has, we were proudly told, more emoticons. I was appalled. The worry with more emoticons is that people might use them.
When we don’t know how to pronounce something, we’ll just use a childish picture. Or not say it at all. Adventures in the language, like how to pronounce names, will stop.
Already, a heart picture means love. Hands clapping denotes applause. Trains, cars, pizzas, coffees – thousands of things – are communicated as little pictures. No one types “West Highland Terrier” they use a childish drawing of a doggy.
Place names won’t be immune. Belfast will represented by pictures of a bell and a figure running. Baghdad will be a bag and a pictogram showing a father figure.
I’m sounding like those generously-bearded people you see on city streets with cardboard signs declaring “Repent! The end is nigh!”. But I believe hundreds of thousands of words are going to die.
We are careening blindly into the most disastrous language change in human history.
Word of the week
Teratoid (adjective)
Grotesquely deformed. EG: “22nd Century English will be a teratoid shadow of what it is today”.
Read the latest Oh my word! every Saturday in The Courier. Contact me at sfinan@dctmedia.co.uk
