Month: November 2017

Silent letters

The other day I came across a wonderful Wikipedia page entitled “List of places in England with counterintuitive pronunciations“. There are so many examples that the list is divided up across two different pages, A-L and M-Z. Unfortunately, the actual pronunciations are given in the International Pronunciation Alphabet, which I can’t read, so I went looking for a more accessible guide and found this one from BBC America. My favorite examples: Woolfardisworthy, which is pronounced woolsery (note that there are literally more silent letters than pronounced ones in the written name), Towcester, pronounced toaster, and Oswaldtwistle, pronounced ozzletwizzle (which is not too counterintuitive, but is a delightful word).

Woolfardisworthy
The name is also sometimes written as it is pronounced. From the Daily Express.

In the spirit of fairness, here’s the list of places in the U.S. with counterintuitive pronunciations. Early on the list is my hometown, Amherst, which is pronounced amerst, with a silent H. Not as bad as a silent “fardisworth”, but I still managed to mispronounce it for the first seven years that I lived here.

Francesco Lana de Terzi

Recently I looked up the term “airship” to make sure that I was using it correctly and came across the Wikipedia page for Francesco Lana de Terzi, a Jesuit priest who came up with an airship design based on copper spheres evacuated of air in 1670. This concept later came to be known as a vacuum airship, now known to be physically implausible on Earth, but possibly useful on planets with lower air pressure.

Flying Boat
Lana de Terzi’s vacuum airship. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Lana de Terzi’s prescience was remarkable, both in his recognition of buoyancy as a mechanism for flight and his consideration of the consequences of such an invention:

…God would surely never allow such a machine to be successful, since it would create many disturbances in the civil and political governments of mankind. Where is the man who can fail to see that no city would be proof against his surprise, as the ships at any time could be maneuvered over its public squares and houses? Fortresses and cities could thus be destroyed, with the certainty that the aerial ship could come to no harm, as iron weights, fireballs and bombs could be hurled from a great height.

(Source: Fairfield University faculty website)

In this quote, Lana de Terzi predicts the future of warfare with amazing clarity — while also assuming that God would prevent its occurrence. I wonder what he would think if he were brought forward in time to witness the World Wars.