MovieChat Forums > Hysteria (2011) Discussion > Sin Jin?

Sin Jin?

posted 12 years ago by slgr7
13 replies | jump to latest

Maybe I'm unworldly but this is the first time I've heard "St. John" pronounced as "sin jin." Any Britishy people here care to explain why it's pronounced this way.

[–] orangaboom 12 years ago

here is roger moore at it in a view to a kill. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4gPBO0CM78

[–] Spiny_Norman 12 years ago

I remember this British politician from the Thatcher era, and his name was pronounced this way too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_St_John_Stevas

"Everybody in the WORLD, is bent"

[–] Drewy 11 years ago

Wait till he/she finds out how to pronounce Cholmondeley.

[–] Franco_Zed 11 years ago

Chumley?

_____
My idea of fasting is eating 3 cookies… instead of 8.

[–] Sugarminx 11 years ago

.....AND let's not overlook Featherstonehaugh....

You fill me with inertia - George Spiggott

[–] Drewy 11 years ago

Can't help with why. It just is. You may be interested in this Wikipedia page with place names, and first and last names, that are pronounced very differently from what you might expect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_names_in_English_with_counterintuitive_pronunciations

St John is towards the bottom of the page.

[–] adrossan 11 years ago

Very old British custom - the "Saint John" is slurred into the single word Sinjin.

Now explain why you Americans call a herb "an urb", which is a pure bastardisation of the French word "herb", and the English custom of dropping *some* h's from pronunciation, and replacing the prefix "a" with the grammatically correct "an", once the "h" is dropped.....

[–] klm160871 11 years ago

and the inability to pronounce aluminium properly. Its not a-loo-minum!

[–] catbookss 9 years ago

and the inability to pronounce aluminium properly. Its not a-loo-minum!

"I've received multiple questions about the naming of element 13, which I call aluminum and most of the world calls aluminium. Why are there two names? Sir Humphry Davy proposed the name aluminum, back before the element was officially discovered. However, the name 'aluminium' was adopted to conform with the -ium names of most other elements. In 1925, the American Chemical Society decided to go back to the original aluminum, so the United States uses a different name from most other countries. The IUPAC periodic table lists both spellings."

http://chemistry.about.com/b/2014/05/04/aluminum-or-aluminium.htm

[–] valleycats 11 years ago

Like Pall Mall is pronounced Pell Mell and Pepys is pronounced Peeps.....?

[–] [email protected] 11 years ago

Pall Mall is pronouncd Pal Mal..not Pell Mell or Paul Maul

[–] jajceboy 8 years ago

I first heard that pronunciation in "Four Weddings and a Funeral" when Rowan Atkinson pronounced it as Saint John and the guy corrected him and said Sin Jin
That was very strange to me too. Really? never heard of that.
My question now is every St John pronounced as Sin Jin or are some St John in fact St John?

Like many English rules we never know why some words are pronounced differently than they are spelled. Perhaps it was to to long and time consuming to say St John so they shortened it and it stayed on?

[–] dakowill11 8 years ago

Ahh I remember the first time I heard St. John pronounced "sinjin" was in my English Literature class back at college in the late 1990s. I had the same reaction as many I'm sure when first encountering this name. We had been reading Jane Eyre I think it was and the character St. John Rivers was under discussion. And I was thinking, "Who the hell are they all talking about?!" It was then that I learned of the idiosyncratic pronunciation of this name in the UK.