According to the City of Elgin [IL] website, the city was named after a Scottish hymn called "The Song of Elgin", which is about the Scottish town. No one is sure today how
that town was named, but websites on its history say it’s believed to be named after Helgy, a Norwegian general who overran the area early in the 10th century and may have founded a settlement at the site. Helgy, I guess, was named by his parents [LOL], it’s a first name that meant “holy” in their version of Old Norse, and that word came from somewhere...
So it seems The Elgins took over an earlier name of The Temptations, who had named their group after the watchmaker, which was named after a city in Illinois, which was named after a song about a town in Scotland, which may have been named after a Viking general.
It's common [usual?] for g to be pronounced like j when it starts a syllable and is followed by an i, e, or y. That's true for "gin" so I think it feels “natural” to pronounce it El-jin. Perhaps the Illinois city was first pronounced with a hard g by its Scottish settlers, but everyone else kept calling it El-jin so they just gave up and went with the flow? A lot of immigrants to the US accepted and adopted such changes to their own surnames rather than insisting on the “correct” pronounciation. In any case, saying El-jin for the Illinois city is
right because people agree on it.
It's not always the Americans who changed something where there are differences. In the 18th century, “gotten” was the past participle of get in both Britain and the US [get / got / gotten]. Today, “gotten” is still correct in the US but it’s “got” in Britain [get / got / got]. This change caught on in 19th century Britain and became standard. This can be true for some pronounciations as well, there have been huge changes in British pronounciation since the American Revolution.
Language is changing all the time and
some things that are considered “wrong” are later accepted as “right.”
It used to be pronounced with a soft C in English but academics changed it because they wanted it to sound more like the original Greek word than a French word [many wanted to change the spelling to Kelt as well]. The wide acceptance of this change is fairly recent - I found this quote from Fowler's 1926 Dictionary of Modern English Usage on "Celt[ic]": "The spelling C-, & the pronunciation s-, are the established ones, & no useful purpose seems to be served by the substitution of k-."
The football club in Glasgow is still called SELL-tic. The club's founding [1887] predates wide acceptance of the change in pronounciation.
The bottom line is, for a lot of words/names in English, you have to hear what’s correct [or see it written phonetically] before you can know.
LOL, don't go with the flow on that one - TREE-vur sounds ridiculous.
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