OP clearly doesn’t know what the three shells are for.
Fun UK fact - we use a different ranking system for lecturers:
Lecturer Senior Lecturer Reader Professor
That means, at some point, someone has been a “Reader in X at Reading”.
To help my American lemmings with pronunciation: Red-ing and Bark-shere.
It’s a very good university too.
Anglophones have no right to complain about French pronunciation. What the fuck is this shit?
ever heard of ghoti?
Tell me about it English is a bastardised language made up of so many different languages rules. Have you heard of Lee and Perrins Worcestershire sauce? It’s pronounced wuster-shere.
Great sauce btw, real umami flavour and great on cheese on toast.
My favourite is Wymondham. (Like the blowy kind,) Wind-um.
Also, fuck Worcester sauce.
I like Towcester.
Excellent for breakfast crumpets.
I’ve heard it as “English isn’t a language. It’s three languages under a trench coat, pretending to be a language.”
James Acaster’s classic Kettering Town FC bit starts with another example 😁
Half the reason our pronunciation is so weird is that a bunch of French guys took over England
It would be so much easier if we had accents over our vowels, like in a lot of languages to indicate which of that vowels sounds was wanted.
https://oldenglish.info/advpronunciationguide.html
English used to be phonetic, it’s just people started changing the way they pronounced vowels, but the spelling stayed the same. For example, both the k and the gh in “knight” used to be pronounced.
That took me longer than it should have, as I automatically read Reading as Reading instead of reading. That’s rad.
There’s also the Reading festival. A common misconception is that it’s a music festival. It’s actually a festival of books.
Just rename the county to Bookshire ffs
