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Conniebird
member
? about Leigh.
Conniebird
member
in Baby Names
how come in names Leigh is pronounced Lee (take for instance, the dreaded Rileigh) however in normal everyday english leigh is pronounced lay, like sleigh or even neigh if you drop the L
any english majors (or people who know better grammar than I ) know why this is?
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Re: ? about Leigh.
Because English is one massively f* up language.
-eigh is not always pronounced like a long A. Look at words like Height (long I), or Raleigh (long E).
The word leigh (like in Raleigh) means "meadow". A lot of English place names or last names have this word in it to indicate nearness or location in a field or meadow. See also: Vivien Leigh, the actress. When people use a name derived from this lace name association (or even made up to look like it is, like Kaileigh) that's what they're going for.
I can't believe you would accept that fallacy, as an English teacher. Names are not exceptions to the rules, they're either spelled correctly, as according to English phonetics or the phonetics of their originating language or they're spelled incorrectly. The parents of little Kamrynne might want me to read their daughter's name as Cameron and they might pronounce it that way themselves (though in this specific example, I would bet the opposite is true), but unfortunately, that's not correct--it reads cam-RINN vs. the traditional CAM-er-uhn. If I were to see the name written, rather than spoken, I'll pronounce it the way it reads, all knowledge of what they meant to spell aside.
OP: I think in the case of Leigh we can blame regional dialects for the varying pronunciations. By American-English phonetics, -eigh should always read with the Long-A sound. It doesn't because at least one, but probably several, different regional dialects have selected for the Long-E pronunciation. Sadly, I don't think there's any hope of unifying the pronunciation, either.
This. And as an aside, it irritated me to know end as a Leah that people would also pronounce Leigh the same as my name.
That's not true at all. Regional dialects are not to blame for the fact that height (German heissen) and eight (Old English, ehta) don't rhyme. It's the same as with cough and through and though. This is the way English works because there were so many origin languages and so many changes and so little in terms of standardized spelling. Even Jane Austen didn't use what we'd call standard spelling. It's the reason why you see things like Sarah and Sara and Anne and Ann and Catherine and Katharine -- some Catherines in English history would spell their names differently depending on who they were writing to. (Or, possibly, their mood at the time.)
The word "Leigh" comes from the old English "leah" -- PRONOUNCED LEE. Not only is Leigh (pronounced Lee) in common usage as a place name and suffix all over England (and America), but the suffix also exists, pronounced Lee, in the form of "ley" -- like in Ashley.
Long story short, Lee is not the only way to spell the Lee sound. I doubt many people here would accept the Ashlee spelling either.
No kidding! I have never understood why people insist on pronouncing Leigh as "Leah".
From what I heard as a kid, it was always;
"I before E except after C or when sounding like A as in Neighbor or Weigh."
I know that's how some people spell 'LEE' but I prefer literal spellings. I had to think about names long and hard when we got pregnant. Which is why I chose Remington "Remy".
It gets irritating to hear people pronounce a name wrong, or even for that matter spell it wrong.
I totally agree that English laws of phonetics have numerous discrepancies--it would be pointless to disagree, actually, because it's an obvious fact and quite easily proven with your examples and the dozens of others that exist. However, traditional English and American-English vary dramatically from one another.
My point was that we would all, at least here in States, pronounce Leigh as lay or lee (one or the other, unified), if not for the persistent force of regional dialects; just as in the UK, you'll find regional dialects change the pronunciations of Leigh. Leigh upon Mendip, for example, is pronounced Lay upon Mendip, while the city of Leigh in Dorset, England is pronounced Lee. It varies just as commonly there as it does here, though I think traditional English has a strong preference for lee, while the US shows a tendancy to use it as lay . . . or at least, did, until it became the trendiest way to spell Ashleigh and Haileigh (I actually met a Brittneigh not too long ago, too).
I would consider unified spelling, as passed down from Olde English to Middle English (a normalized form of which is still used today) to American English to be a different argument altogether. Standardized spellings of names or words didn't exist until the late 1500s and even then, couldn't be checked or verified against any one database. In fact, English vowel sounds weren't even established until then--so there was no unification of spelling or pronunciation. Perhaps that's actually to blame for the disparate pronunciations of Leigh, rather than word origins--or the combined forces of both.