How to say Worcester in Czech (and other curious sounds)

Let’s be honest with ourselves – even native English speakers sometimes puzzle over the pronunciation of some English words. The randomness of English enunciatin is brought out nicely by my beloved P. G. Wodehouse in the opening passage of his Sir Agravaine, A Tale of King Arthur’s Round Table, which introduces a certain “Duke of Weatherstonhope (pronounced Wop)”.

Some foreigners will just pronounce English names the way they would pronounce them in their own language (the French saying [mon-TEE pee-TOHN] to indicate Monty Python is a good example), but the Czechs don’t do things the easy way. No! The diligent Czech will wrestle stubbornly with the irregularities of English pronunciation, trying to twist and bend its tenets into some form of regularity and achieving, on many occasions, a uniquely creative result.

I think ‘Worcester’ (the name of a city and county in England, but much more commonly associated with a spicy condiment) is the best example of how thoroughly Czech people have come to taylor English pronunciation to their own whims. If you tell any Czech person, anywhere in the country, that you would like some [wooster] sauce in your Bloody Mary, they will stare blankly back at you without budging. Nobody, not a soul in this country knows, you see, that [wooster] is the correct pronunciation of what has become a household term. Employed in every imaginable dish and uttered on a daily basis in kitchens and pubs, it is unanimously and unflinchingly pronounced throughout the Czech nation as [WAR-chester]. Yep, that’s right. If you’re in the Czech Republic and you want some Worcester sauce on your egg on toast, say it with me: WAR-CHESTER. Atta-one!

The sources of other mispronunciations aren’t as mysterious. It would, after all, be logical from the likes of such words as ‘cheese’ and ‘chunk’ that Chicago would be pronounced [CHICK-eygo], although why anyone would insist that champagne (a French word, for crying out loud) be pronounced [CHAM-payne] in English conversation remains a mystery to me. The vast majority of Czechs pronounce the City of Angels as [loss angie-LEES], too, which looks a bit like trying to be more Catholic than the Pope to me.

Then again, the linguistic harm that Czech people are capable of incurring is roughly limited to the area of the country they inhabit (a small one, in case you’re one of those people). English-speakers, on the contrary, can cause permanent articulative damage on a truly global scale. One of my pet peeves (and one on which I humorously illustrate my pedantism) is the worldwide mispronunciation of the name Tintin. I wonder if you had any clue that, the character having been created by the Belgian comic artist Georges Rémi, it’s really pronounced [tan-tan]? That said, Tintin’s British accent in Steven Spielberg’s film makes no sense to me, whatsoever.

Ah, well. Good old Eddie Izzard understands me, I know.