Quote:
Originally Posted by doubleshuffle
Well, nowadays all the online dictionaries offer audio pronunciations, so it'll become less and less common, I guess.
For our case: /æ/ would be the vowel in "cat" and "mat", /ᴧ/ the one in "cup". (Though to non-native ears like mine, the difference between the two gets harder to spot the further north you get. Hence my confusion about Alnwick.)
|
Some people do say "ah-nik" ("ah" as in "cart") rather than "a-nik", but I think "a-nik" is more common. The important point is that the "l" and the "w" are silent.
There are lots of place names ending in "-wick", which in Anglo Saxon meant "a place where goods are traded", and the "w" is almost always silent, so "Warwick" is pronounced "Worrik", "Chiswick" is pronounced "Chizik", and so on. It's the same word as "vik" in "viking", as a matter of interest: vikings were (originally at least) people who traded.