Channel 4 weatherman pronounces Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch—perfectly

September 10, 2015 • 2:30 pm

From HuffPo we learn the achievement of weatherman Liam Dutton, who, on a weather report, smoothly and flawlessly pronounced the world’s second longest place name, the Welsh village of Lanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. Here’s a video I found on YouTube:

The HuffPo link came from reader reader Laurie, whose husband, Gethyn, is Welsh. As she told me, “According to Geth, who grew up ten minutes from there and whose native language is Welsh, it’s a flawless pronunciation.”

You’re surely wondering, then, what the world’s longest place name is. According to Wikipedia, it’s this:

Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu
is the Māori name for a hill located close to Porangahau, south of Waipukurau in southern Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand.

It’s not a village, though, which leaves the Welsh town (population 3040) with the record for biggest populated jawbreaker.

46 thoughts on “Channel 4 weatherman pronounces Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch—perfectly”

  1. He’s probably the only one at Channel 4 News who can pronounce that name. That’s how you create job security.

    1. Quite impressive, considering the number of newscasters who couldn’t even attempt to manage ‘Eyjafjallajokull’ passably.

      cr

        1. There are several, here’s one:
          http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSo_ND41-6g

          Some reporters made a half-way decent attempt, others just gave up and couldn’t even manage an approximation like ‘eya-fyatla-yokel’. (Or pronounced it ‘volcano’ 😉 There’s a collection of their attempts on Youtube too.

          cr

    1. Llanfairpwllgwngyll is the same place – and real name of – “Llanfairpwllgwyngyll”gogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.

  6. Useful fact for the day: The New Zealand one is just a few miles up the road from where Maurice Wilkins was born

  7. I have no trouble pronouncing the Maori one, and it’s real (it was there before Europeans “discovered” NZ), but I’ve never been able to get my head around Welsh.

    1. A Welsh colleague to whom I sent this commented that “a few people find it difficult to cope with a straightforward name that has four consecutive l’s –… llll … but when you break down into
      …drobwll …. llantysiliog … it then seems so obvious!”

      1. I was in my 20s before I realized Llanelli and “Klintethly” (as I heard it) were the same place, so no, I don’t go along with that! 🙂

        1. In a previous life in the mid-1980s I went there to visit my then wife’s relatives. On arrival I was immediately taken for a tour of the town consisting entirely of being shown the scoreboard at the rugby grounds which still had the 1972 result of Llanelli 9- Seland Newydd 3.

          For the uninitiated this was the occasion when a minor Welsh rugby club defeated the All Blacks (the New Zealand rugby team) and the poem by Max Boyce ‘9-3’ was written to celebrate.

          “The shops were closed like Sunday and the streets were silent still,
          And those who chose to stay away were either dead or ill,
          But those who went to Stradey park will remember till they die,
          How New Zealand Were defeated and how the pubs ran dry.”

          1. That event is why I always remember the name of that particular town! It still gets talked about here too, especially is someone thinks the All Blacks are getting a bit over-confident. 🙂

    2. There was an extended version in the song “The Lone Ranger” (Quantum Jump, 1978) which appeared in the opening credits of the “Kenny Everett Video Show” (“And now, before you can say… taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu (extra added here) …it’s the Kenny Everett Video Show!”).

      My cousin and I had a bet to see who could memorize it first (it was a draw) and continue to use it to this day on odd occasions (those occasions when people think we are “odd”).

      Reading about it now, it is interesting to see that although I think I still have it vividly memorized 37 years later, the memory has, in fact, accumulated errors over time.

      1. Very cool indeed!

        Now you’ve reminded me, I remember that. I used to love the Kenny Everett Video Show. 🙂

    1. Which reminds me of this page from “The Brand New Monty Python Bok” (sic):

      ppsa.com/gif/LLAP01.gif

    1. Yeah but the Welsh guy rattled off LlanfairPG fluently, the kiwi presenter had to pause a couple of times in the middle to work out what came next. She may even have been reading it off the teleprompter. She absolutely did not, as their tweet claimed, ‘ace’ it. I’m sure I’ve seen Maori entertainers do it better.

      cr

      1. She looked like she was doing it from memory to me, and I thought that was what was making her pause. It is actually just a lot of words run together, and a more fluent Maori speaker could probably do a better job.

        Like you, I’ve seen others do a better job of it. I’m pretty sure I heard Billy T say it back in the day.

      3. It’s not something I’m given much opportunity to brag about but I can pronounce Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch perfectly too. I moved to north Wales as a seven year old Londoner and learnt Welsh in a learners’ school a year later. I’m still fluent now although my spelling and grammar’s appalling because I went to an English-speaking secondary school and never really had much cause to write in Welsh – but I’m still comfortable with spoken Welsh.
        What a pain – the one, dreary talent I have and this newsreader got there first.

          1. I can also do tap, and sing Gilbert & Sullivan whilst juggling. I don’t understand why I’m so unpopular at parties.

  10. I checked Liam Dutton’s website biography page. He was born and raised in Cardiff. Technically, that makes him Welsh. Even if Cardiff isn’t exactly Welsh-speaking territory, he’d have been taught some Welsh language in school, and I’m sure that pronouncing the name of that town correctly would be a standard stunt for any young kid to master.

  11. Given the length of the name, it seems almost churlish to point out that the link in the text is missing an ‘l’ in the first syllable.

  12. “According to Wikipedia” that Maori name is the longest place name [i]found in any English-speaking country[/i], not the longest overall.

    Another contender might be [url=”http://www.herring.org.uk/panorama/html/th/bkk/bangkok-name.html”]the capital of Thailand:[/url]
    กรุงเทพมหานครอมรรัตนโกสินทร์มหินทรายุธยามหาดิลกภพนพรัตน์ ราชธานีบุรีรมย์อุดมราชนิเวศน์มหาสถานอมรพิมานอวตารสถิตสักกะทัตติยะวิษณุกรรมประสิทธิ์ though the use of a different alphabet makes it difficult to say how many “letters” it uses.

    (and yes, I can pronounce it without notes!)

    1. In english it is usually shown as Krung Thep Mahanakhon Amon Rattanakosin Mahinthara Ayuthaya Mahadilok Phop Noppharat Ratchathani Burirom Udomratchaniwet Mahasathan Amon Piman Awatan Sathit Sakkathattiya Witsanukam Prasit which runs to 167 letters. In Thai I make it 112 letters +13 superscript vowels. It is of course not relly a long name as Thai doesn’t leave breaks between words in their sentences but then the Welsh is also a set of words joined together.

      1. So is the Maori. Probably any long name in any language is just a lot of shorter words linked together.

        cr

Comments are closed.