For people interested in this kind of stuff, Guy Deutscher's book "The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention" is a fun read!
As is the "The History of English" podcast [0], for the more aurally inclined.
On a related note, the Great Vowel Shift [1] of the 14-16th century really fucked English over. Apparently it was a close call back then, English almost kept its "regular", conservative pronunciation ("meet", "boot" like in German), instead of the current idiosyncratic chaos.
Bizarre pronunciation of British proper names like Cholmondeley (pronounced: Chumley!), Worcester or Norwich are another one of my favourites.
"Worcester" and "Norwich" are sort of regular, in the sense that the "ces" in "-cester" suffixes often gets elided into an "s" (e.g. "Gloucester", pronounced "Gloster") and the "w" in "-wick" and "-wich" suffixes is typically dropped completely (e.g. "Greenwich", "Warwick", "Berwick", pronounced "Grennidge", "Worick", "Berick" respectively).
Gloucester makes sense if you consider that it's pronounced "Glouce-ster" rather than "Glou-cester". You wouldn't pronounce Glouce as "Glou-se", but to rhyme with "grouse".
It is, I think GP means it makes sense if you view the syllable break there, and then shorten it and say it quickly because you're lazy and that's what happens.
True; and yet the British pejorative "berk" ("fool", "idiot") rhymes with "work" but is supposedly a contraction of "Berkeley Hunt" (rhyming slang for a word much ruder than the fairly mild "berk").
I have read (no source at hand though) that that one used to be "Nor-itch" but during the 20th century the pronunciation was gradually forgotten and replaced with a spelling pronunciation. If I remember correctly the same was true of Warwick ("War-ick") Rhode Island.
Those wacky Nutmeggers (who badly need a standard demonym by the way) also pronounce their local Thames River as thaymz and yes that's with the th as in thick. But they do pronounce Greenwich (CT) as the English do.
We have a few remnants of the British colonialists here in Kenya. And one such, who has since passed on but was on the news regularly was called Cholmondeley. With the exception of one newscaster, who taught us how to read the name correctly, the rest always mispronounced the name. We also have a well name office block called Warwick Center and I am yet to hear someone dropping the second 'w'. Well, I didn't know that, too, until I met a someone from 'Worick' University.
As is the "The History of English" podcast [0], for the more aurally inclined.
On a related note, the Great Vowel Shift [1] of the 14-16th century really fucked English over. Apparently it was a close call back then, English almost kept its "regular", conservative pronunciation ("meet", "boot" like in German), instead of the current idiosyncratic chaos.
Bizarre pronunciation of British proper names like Cholmondeley (pronounced: Chumley!), Worcester or Norwich are another one of my favourites.
[0] http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/page/10/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift