My grandfather said his first job (as an apprentice) was measuring the Lea and Perrins factory for new mixing vats.
It looks like they've replaced them again, since that time.
And couldn't they have told the scientist that it's "Worcestershire Sauce" and not "Worcester Sauce"? Worcestershire is the county, Worcester is the largest city in that county.
At least it's pronounced correctly. Worcester/Worcestershire rhyme with Leicester/Leicestershire, and pronunciation of "Leicester" should be familiar to Americans as the personal name "Lester". ("Wuster" hasn't caught on yet.)
-cester as a suffix to a place name is from the Latin castrum, meaning fort – these were Roman settlements.
> And couldn't they have told the scientist that it's "Worcestershire Sauce" and not "Worcester Sauce"?
I've heard plenty of English people pronounce it "Wooster Sauce". I'm pretty sure they're aware of the difference. I think it's just become a standard contraction.
Worcester Sauce is a common way to refer to it. Even and Lea and Perrins used to do so - here's an advert for it from the 1840s, along with some generic references to it from the 1830s.
I assumed many Americans, like myself, would be familiar with the pronunciation of Worcester from Worcester, Massachusetts. I didn’t even grow up anywhere near New England.
It doesn't help that the correct pronunciation of "Worcestershire", something like Wu-sta-sha, looks a lot like "Warchester". One is tempted to wrongly map the syllables Wor->Wu Che->Ste Ster->Sha.
Btw. this is one of the prime examples why I think we should use phonetic transscription not only for different alphabets, but also for languages that use latin characters with very different pronunciation (like Irish or Welsh), or even for odd English words like this one.
We do, it's called IPA and Worcestershire is /ˈwʊstərʃər/.
Using something similar for actual normal writing would be difficult though, it would hide all the etymological linkages between different European languages, and even obscure connections within each language.
"Worcester" violates practically every convention of English spelling and pronunciation. Is there any other word in which "rce" even appears, let alone is silent?
`egrep '^[a-z].*rce' /usr/share/dict/words | grep -v "'s" | wc` gives 157 for me but there's a lot of duplication - probably comes down to about 35 base words from a quick eyeball.
There are plenty of other place names that end in -cester pronounced as -ster: gloucester, leicester, bicester. It's somewhat of a rule itself. wor sounding more like woo is just the local accent I think.
I think what's confusing for Americans who didn't grow up with a lot of towns named that way is that "cester" is pronounced "ster", but "chester" is pronounced fully. Throw in a "shire" at the end of that and it's a mouthful.
"rce" is not a syllable here, so it's not that relevant. It's Wor + cester, and cester is always pronounced ster. So it's actually not very surprising.
It's not really that "ce is silent", it's that cester is pronounced "ster". It's extremely common in languages that long, old roots like that are elided in speak - in French they basically always elide the last syllable!
cester/caster/chester (from castrum, meaning fort/castle) is a very common place name ending in English and the cester variant is almost always pronounced ster. Think Leicester, Gloucester, Worcester.
Leicester (the city, not the square in London named for it) is just south of the town of Loughborough.
Leicestershire in general has more than its fair share of difficult placenames: Ashby de la Zouch, South Croxton, Kirby Bellars, Belvoir, Rotherby vs Rothley, Frisby on the Wreake, Nether Broughton, Kibworth Beauchamp, Glooston* (not sure of this one myself), Wymeswold.
I have to say the biggest challenge I had was hiking in wales in Snowdonia and trying to inquire about town and village names. I ended up writing them down to show because I butchered the names no matter how much I tried.
Welsh is a completely different language, with its own writing system.
dd → th, ff → f, ll → hl (ish), w → oo gets you most of the way to being understood as a tourist, in my experience. (Though I'm British, so I've heard many of the larger Welsh place names pronounced properly since childhood, via TV/radio etc.)
if you go that route, ketchup share a very similar lineage as well, albeit it picked up more transformations along the way, it still carries the name as legacy.
I'm not sure if this was intentional, but if it was, well played.
Anyway it's interesting how many times fish fermentation (seemingly independently) seems to have cropped up in various cultures. A bit strange, since you have to be pretty dang hungry before you even go close to a fermenting fish.
I wonder what made it stop. Just centuries of regional specialization that were quickly wiped out when long distance bulk trade went away when the Roman Empire collapsed?
