Originally Posted by rickg523

About British place names. Can we be honest? Whether you're American or British, the pronunciation of place names in Britain is almost perverse. I've wondered whether this was a legacy of being conquered by Francophones. They're also fond of speaking with lots of unpronounced letters.
For Americans, these names must be learned by rote. As some of the examples cited demonstrate, there is no way to guess correctly. How do British learn them? Doesn't anyone ever mispronounce Leicester or Marylebone? Do you never speak them until you've heard them spoken?
One other thing I noticed. Mostly British pronunciation voices the letter 'a' as in 'father'. Much less common is the 'hard' a.
But almost invariably I've heard a in foreign place names pronounced as in 'max' when the native pronunciation is the common British ah (more or less).
Americans do this as well, but that hard a is much more generally common in American speech so to me more understandable that they'll carry that forward while it seems that carrying the ah pronunciation forward to foreign places names would be more natural for a Briton, yet that doesn't seem to be the case.
(I've been curious about this. Anyone have a theory?)