Hewston? Texus??? One doesn't need to be English to misspell one's own name!
May 31, 2000
GREAT BRINGTON JOURNAL
Why Can't the English ...? It's Pronounced Clahss
By SARAH LYALL
Mark Stewart/Camera Press/Retna
The name of Althorp House is now pronounced AWL-thorp--not AWL-trupp, as it has been for who knows how many centuries--by order of Earl Spencer, whose estate it is.
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GREAT BRINGTON, England -- It is spelled simply enough, in just two syllables, with no strange or gimmicky combinations of letters. But for centuries it has been grievously mispronounced by everyone who is not anyone.
And no wonder. Why would the average person know that "Althorp" is supposed to be pronounced AWL-trupp?
That is exactly the question Earl Spencer, brother of Diana, Princess of Wales, and the owner of Althorp, the family's impressive ancestral estate next to this tiny village, asked himself recently. In a highly unaristocratic move, the earl announced that "Althorp" should henceforth be known the way common people might think it should be known, as AWL-thorp.
"It seems fitting to change the pronunciation once and for all to a version that everyone can pronounce and understand," he said.
The earl, who particularly wants things to be user-friendly for the tens of thousands of visitors he hopes to attract this summer to the Diana-themed memorial at Althorp, said the word had always given him trouble. Before he inherited his earldom and went by the lowlier title of Viscount Althorp, for instance, he arrived at a new job in New York to find his name listed as "Al Thorp." |
