On July 22, I wrote a column about how people pronounce the names of Minnesota cities: Alba Lea, Otonna, Har’lan’, Haywer, Blurth, Nulm, Sane Paul, Brainud, Pry a Lake, Legville, Mape a Grove, Or Unville, Mannerville, The Friva Foss.

An astute reader soon after let me know I skipped a good one: Clars Krove.

And I should have picked on Minnasoda’s biggest city: Minnaplus.

Minnasodans aren’t the only people who slur their place names. In Bill Bryson’s “The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way” he shows us how the people who live in a place slaughter the names worse than visitors. He shares these examples:

In Louisville, it’s Loovul.

In Milwaukee, it’s Mwawkee.

In Iowa, it’s Iwa.

In Ohio, it’s Hia.

In Newark, it’s Nerk.

In Indianapolis, it’s Naplus.

In Philadelphia — you got love this one — it’s Fuhluffia.

Australians comes from Stralia.

Torontoans come from Tronna.

If you clip the front of a word, it is aphesis. If it is the back, it is apocope. If it is the middle, it is syncope. This process is as old as language itself. For instance, asparagus 200 years ago was sparrow grass.

Bryson didn’t mention one of the most famous slurred cities: In New Orleans, it is Nawlins.

I like comparing how we say words to how we spell words.

Why is it we pronounce one as “wun” and once as “wunce,” and yet we say alone, atone and only? One comes from the Latin unus, and many other languages reflect that, such as uno in Spanish. Why don’t we say “oon” or “own” for one?

Bryson speaks on that matter, too.

The Norman invasion of 1066 brought the French language into England, melding the two languages. However, the Normans weren’t the most sophistated of French speakers. After all, William the Conquerer and his soldiers descended from Vikings. Being from the north is where the names Norman and Normandy come from. This was a rough, rural French being placed into the mongrel English language, which already had become the descendant of Old English, Old Norse and Gaelic. Moreover, people in various parts of England pronounced and spelled words differently.

But the Normans were in charge, and their scribes had to tackle this mess, which was completely foreign to them. They began turning the language to their orthographic preferences.

“Had William the Conquerer been turned back at Hastings, we would spell queen as cwene,” Bryson writes.

Because the Normans didn’t speak the French of Paris, in dictionaries today you often see etymology of some words explained as “Anglo-Norman,” rather than “French.”

These Norman scribes placed o for u in many places, such as come and some and one. It made sense to them, but not for later users of the English language.

The Normans never tried to suppress English, and after losing Normandy in 1204 they became to think of themselves as residents of the island, rather than the continent. Over time, they intermarried and became English. More changes to the language happened as the use of French died out in England, leaving many French words in the English language but also resulting in many French words getting kicked out of the language.

“As we have seen elsewhere, the absence of a central authority for the English language for three centuries meant that dialects prospered and multiplied. When at last French died out and English words rushed in to take their place in official and literary use, it sometimes happened that people adopted the spelling used in one part of the country and pronunciation used in another,” Bryson writes.

So for one and once, “the answer in both cases is that Southern pronunciations attached themselves to East Midland spellings. Once they were pronounced more or less as spelled — i.e., ‘oon’ and ‘oons.’”

In fact, speakers of the Southern English dialect went through a phase of pronouncing words that started with o with a w sound and sometimes even spelling them with a w. Many died out, but one and once survived.

This was all before the printing press came along.

Later, as the printing press was beginning to more permanently fix the language’s spellings, English was going through an upheaval. That’s how we ended up with k and g in words like knee and gnaw. Knee was pronounced “kuh-nee,” and gnaw was pronounced “guh-naw.”

In Old English, there were six ways to make plurals, but by the time of the printing press, there were mainly two. Some people made plurals with -en and some with -s. The words children, brethren, oxen, men and women survive. The London way, with -s, won out. If Winchester had remained the seat of government, perhaps we would say housen (houses), doughtren (daughters) and shoen (shoes). Teeth, feet and geese are reminders of the little-used Old English plurals.

Our modern spellings reflect pronounciations from 400 years ago, all thanks to the printing press. If it had been invented 100 years sooner or later, we would have different spellings.

“The Mother Tongue” gives many insights into the language. I read the book five years ago. It’s fun to revisit, and Bryson, who is from Des Moines, Iowa, is fun to read. It’s not the boring stuff of English textbooks. If you like to write, check it out.

Tribune Managing Editor Tim Engstrom’s column appears every Tuesday.