Talk:Strachan, Aberdeenshire

Spelling change & pronunciation
I have never visited this place, but it would appear to be where my forebears came from.

I cannot cite references for this, but when I was at university, I met a Scottish historian (not named Strachan), who told me about the history of the name. Originally, as the article states, the name was something like StraTh-aan or Strathan, with the pronunciation "Strawn". The change of spelling to a StraChan was, according to him, down to a cartogropher's transcription error, apparently because the T and C look very similar in Gallic runes. The pronunciation remained the same & then folks settled there in the 17th(?) century from Denmark and took their name (and the pronunciation) from the village. As the families spread across Scotland, the pronunciation also changed, as the "ch" sound in Scottish is gutteral (as in "loch"). It subsequently became the norm that "Strawn" was the Anglicised pronunciation compared to the gutteral version - this was true for my family, who only adopted the Strawn pronunciation after settling in Bristol, having hailed from the Dundee area. However, my historian friend asserted that the correct original pronunciation was Strawn.

It is a shame that I can't cite any references for this - perhaps someone else might be able to chase up at least the spelling corruption account, which seems intrinsically interesting.

-- Iain Strachan Alan1507 (talk) 20:37, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

hail from Dundee but my family moved to Nairobi in 1950. Just before that, we had visited the village of Strachan and discovered to our surprise that everyone there pronounces it Strawn. We had always used the firm ch, a sound that is less akin to Germanic guttural and more like the Arabic Ahmet or Bahrain. Since we were about to sojourn among mainly English colonists who we assumed would probably have enough trouble trying to say loch, we adopted the easier pronunciation. I’ve been back and in fact lived in Scotland for 10 years and never found a Scotsman outside the village itself who pronounced it Strawn.

A footnote: I now live in Australia and, a couple of years ago, visited the Tasmanian village of Strahan where I discovered that the original spelling of that was taken from the name of a British (presumably Scottish) officer called Strachan. They probably dropped the C to dissuade visitors from calling it Stracken.

-- Laurie Strachan 3/15 Farmborough Close Bowral NSW 2576 0476128289

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