[Ads-l] Dorchester

[Amy West]

On 4/21/16 12:00 AM, ADS-L automatic digest system wrote:
> Date:    Wed, 20 Apr 2016 08:08:08 -0700
> From:    "James A. Landau"<JJJRLandau at NETSCAPE.COM>
> Subject: Dorchester
>
> My daughter, who lives in Canton, Massachusetts, asks:  If Gloucester is pronounced/glahster/  (I taste not the Pierian spring of IPA) and Worcester is pronounced/wooster/, why isn't Dorchester pronounced/dorchster/  or/dorster/?
>
> - Jim Landau
Well, it's not /wooster/, it's WUH-stuh. And I think I hear DUH-chester 
among the non-rhotic. So, I think the question is really why isn't it 
*DUH-stuh? (And I may have the stresses wrong: I'm not a phonologist)

I think history and spelling prons play a role. Yes, historically that 
-cester and -chester are the same word. So, historically the -rc- and 
-rch- clusters *should* be the same/similar. However, I'd actually look 
to where the settlers here came from England, and where those names in 
England come from, and how they were historically pronounced there. [I'm 
told by a former student of mine who just studied at U of Worcester (UK) 
that they use the same/a similar non-rhotic pron (currently) for the 
name.] The difference in pron. may actually be really, really old: the 
split may be rooted in the various Old English/Anglo-Saxon regional 
dialects. I'd have to do some more poking around instead of just 
responding off the top of my head.

Note the spelling difference: that may either represent a regional pron 
difference of that -c- when the names were brought over or it may have 
influenced folks here to make one -c- sibillant(?) and not the other.

---Amy ("What? I should actually look stuff up?") West
rhotic resident of Worcester

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