I'm out of the village and out of the county (Bedfordshire, which doesn't officially exist any more) to work in Hertfordshire.
One of the presenters on R4's Today programme was corrected about the pronunciation of the Toten ("Toaten not Totten") the site of a new high speed train station. I love place names and the variations in how they are pronounced. Hertfordshire for instance should be written Hartfordshire to be phonetic. To the uninitiated it looks like Hurtfordshire. That's before you try to distinguish it from Herefordshire. Hertfordshire, of course, is home to Ware, which has spawned "Where?" jokes since time immemorial.
More locally, on family trips we have bored each other to death driving past Wyboston on the A1, waiting to see who would be the first to say 'Why not?' Or is it "Wibboston"?
On occasional visits to Brighton you can sometimes hear seaside station announcers saying that the Bedford train will stop at "Flitt Wick" (in addition to "Harpington" and Harlington). The correct spelling kicks in somewhere north of East Croydon. Luckily here in Cranfield pronunciation has never been an issue. Nor has Bedford or Bedfordshire.
More locally, on family trips we have bored each other to death driving past Wyboston on the A1, waiting to see who would be the first to say 'Why not?' Or is it "Wibboston"?
On occasional visits to Brighton you can sometimes hear seaside station announcers saying that the Bedford train will stop at "Flitt Wick" (in addition to "Harpington" and Harlington). The correct spelling kicks in somewhere north of East Croydon. Luckily here in Cranfield pronunciation has never been an issue. Nor has Bedford or Bedfordshire.
4 comments:
I remember moving to Cranfield in the early seventies and listening to the old boys who I struggled to understand: as their accent was so strong (one of them was my grandad). Their pronunciation of Cranfield was more like cra arn full and it is how I think of it now I am living further south
My big diff coming to the village in 1986 was learning to say "Safford" just to distinguish it from the Manchester satellite and home of Coronation Street. LOL Oh and "Ohney". Howe did that happen?
I think it was the local dialect, my grandads generation were really heavy in dialect and he must have thought we were so daft, truth was we didn't understand a word he spoke and were usually guessing what the question was he was asking us. Looking back it is lovely and I wish I had known him better
Try to capture as much as you can remember - even just odd
words. My grandfather could do 1 to 10 in French and German. It was only in adult life I realised this came from his time in a WW1 German POW camp...ein, zwei, drei...
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