MODERN FORMS OF ANCIENT PROPER NAMES. 333 
The wonder is that the name of the river has not come to be 
written, as so persistently pronounced. This is the kind of change 
which has taken place in the names which I am about to adduce. 
The traditional pronunciation was at length phonetically expressed 
and perpetuated. 
Again, a pun or play upon words may sometimes determine the 
pronunciation of a name at a particular time; as in Warwick’s 
“ Roam hither then!” 
in reply to the Bishop of Winchester’s reference to ‘ Rome.”— 
(1 Hen. IV. iii. 1.) This tends to shew that the pronunciation of 
Room—which was prevalent among old-fashioned orthoepists not 
many years ago—was not Shakspeare’s rendering of “Rome.” In 
Roumelia, however, and the Rowmans of Moldavia and Wallachia, 
and in the Turkish sultanate of Rowm, we have intimations that 
this was a pronunciation of Rome, at least in the Eastern Empire. 
Stoequeler (Or‘ental Interpreter, p. 198) gives Room as the Persian 
name to this day, of Constantinople, the Nova Roma of Constantine. 
In a somewhat similar manner, the familiar title “John of Gaunt”’ 
shews, by an incorrect anglicised form, how our forefathers desig- 
nated the birth-place of that personage.* 
But in the case of the ancient Greek and Roman proper names, to 
which I am about to refer, we are not guided to their pronunciation 
by the aid of rhyme—nor by a play upon words—although instances 
of this I think I have seen—but simply by the modern forms which 
they have assumed. 
I begin with some proofs of an unexpected deviation from the 
usual European pronunciation of the first vowel. 
1. The normal sound of the first vowel we may take to be ah.— 
We shall be pretty safe if we give it this sound in most of the for- 
eign words we meet with. Its peculiarly English force is in many 
words, as we have seen, ay, which continentals would rather express. 
by e. Still the curious thing is, that in some ancient proper names, 
as preserved in their modern form, the a seems to have had some- 
thing of this anomalous English sound. Take the name for example, 
of a tributary of the Rhone, entering the main river, near Valence 
—the Isére: the letter which this accented e represents is a in the 
* Ghent: Fr. Gand. Shakspeare, of course, plays on “ Gaunt,”—as, for example, in “ Gaunt 
am I for the grave,” (Ric. II. ii. 1); and Charles V. boasted that he could put all Paris into 
his “Gant” (glove), alluding to the great extent of the city (also his birth-place) in his day. 
