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Reply To: BreTONEia

January 29, 2024 at 7:45 pm #1860423

blinky465

17028xp

@wolfie65 – it’s spelled Britain (bri-tayn) but pronounced Brittan (or Brittun or Brittin or, most likely, Brit’n depending on your dialect – British dialect is very “guttaral” with our nasal truncation and glottal stops!). So the spelling doesn’t really give much away.
I guess there’s an argument that Brettonia with the double-t would reinforce the -o sound.
It’s probably just down to the “rhythm” of spoken British-english? We would say it as a four-syllable word “bre-toe-knee-yah” and we often elongate the middle of words – or put stress on vowels in the middle of a word, while the ends of words tend to “trail off” (that’s the glottal stop again).
Bre-tonn-nia just sounds a little “alien”; like the emphasis in the word is in the wrong place – even if, according to some rules of spelling, it might be the more accurate way of pronouncing it.

If you say it out loud as Bre-tonn-nia, you have to make a nasal sound around “ton”.
But we tend not to put truncated nasal sounds in the middle of spoken words – it makes it sound like two words, not one. So we elongate the vowel sound, to keep the “flow” or rhythm of the word going, to make it clear it’s all part of the same word.

Just guessing.
But I’ve an Italian brother-in-law, a Welsh wife, a German grandson and a sister who’s all but Irish – and hearing the differences in the rhythm of their speech is what makes their native tongues so interesting to listen to.