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[Opinions] Re: Anthony
Here in Australia our prime minister is Anthony Albanese - the th is always sounded. I grew up in England. The first Anthony I heard of was famous prime minister Sir Anthony Eden. My mother always pronounced the th in his name. But when I went to university and pronounced the th in a politics tutorial students from a different English location from me (I was from the south and they from the industrial Midlands and north) laughed and said the th is silent. There was a televison newsreader called Antony Brown -- I assume his parents deliberately chose that spelling because they didn't like the -th. I can't remember how we pronounced Shakespeare's "Mark Anthony" at school. Of course, Charles Dickens's character "Little Dorrit" was pronounced without the h (Dorrit deriving from Dorothy) which makes me suspect that Anthony in mid-nineteenth century England must have been Antony -- at least to the industrial working class (I'm sorry, that sounds snobbish, but England was a terribly stratified society) and that Dorothy and Anthony were older pronunciations. That might explain why Americans use the -th pronunciation, colonisation having started centuries earlier. British settlement in Australia began in the 1780s, and here the th is invariably used in Anthony -- witness Albanese's case but in that of a politician called Doug Anthony (surname). Anneza comments here that the th isn't sounded in Anthony in South Africa -- could this be due to Dutch influence? I knew an English girl who married a Dutchman named Anton -- a very handsome name imho.

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