Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
"St. John" is only "sinjun" when it's somebody's surname. In all other situations it's "Saint John", as you would expect.
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Just to give you a two-for-one: an Irish place name and "St. John". A few miles from where I live is a town called "St Johnston" (pronounced saint-JON-stun locally) - in Gaelic it's "Baile Suingean" (pronounced BA-lah SING-ahn) which translates exactly to "Town of St. John" but
only if 'St. John' was pronounced "sinjun".
Then again, this is probably because the town was named after someone called "St. John" rather than after the saint himself. Thus "sinjun" persisted in the Irish placename, but vanished from the English name, (probably because anyone looking at a map sees saint-JON-stun...)
And it's 'boy' and 'kee' in Ireland too. Although, with somewhat of a reader's pronunciation in my youth, I used to
hear the latter at 'kway' whenever I read it for years, until I connected the familiar sound of 'kee' with the counter-intuitive spelling of 'quay'! (In fact, I was probably corrected... both my parents were teachers.)