The pronunciation of Gloucester and Worcester is very strange in the new campaign. Were they trying to go for a period accurate pronunciation? I don’t think anyone knows the exact pronunciation in those days, so maybe it would have been better to stick with the modern pronunciation, as with other names. Your thoughts?
(The campaign pronounces them something like War-chester and Glow-chester, the modern pronunciation is more like Woosta and Glossta.)
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I really don’t know what to make of this. I thought they were getting better at this sort of thing – having corrected several mispronunciations and improved on some of the accents with the new voiceovers for DE – and I also find it highly unlikely that they both didn’t know how to pronounce ‘Worcester’ and ‘Gloucester’ and didn’t think to look it up. So my guess is that this was done to avoid confusing American audiences – a bit like how Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone has a different (and, ironically, more confusing) title for the American release.
They also mispronounced ‘Acre’ (“Ocker”) and the Welsh accents are not very convincing, but strangely, they seem to have pronounced ‘Llywelyn ap Gruffudd’ correctly.
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https://www.forgottenempires.net/dev-blog-whats-up-with-the-pronunciation-of-the-english-cities-in-the-lords-of-the-west-campaigns They wanted authentic medieval pronunciations.
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I brought this up on reddit after playing the Longshanks 1. As someone living on the Herefordshire/Gloucestershire border it bugged me
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How Americans preserved British English - BBC Culture
When the languages diverged from each other both changed but in different ways, in some place names and word pronunciations Americans will speak them in a form that is closer to 17th century English
This is likely a coincidence with Gloucester and Worcester exhibiting that and not a deliberate copy of American pronunciation, Americans in different regions will either say Glough-sester or Glough-chester and War-sester or War-chester but never Glossta or Woosta unless they have heard the latter pronunciation and intentionally copy it when speaking
Yes, that was my assumption; though, as said, I’m not sure anyone knows the exact pronunciations. The best we can do is guess based off patterns at the time, where the name has been used in plays/poetry, etc. For example, by the time of Shakespeare it seems they had already evolved to being two syllables, based on the scansion in his plays. Of course, that’s a few hundred years after the campaign. I did find a chart listing the evolution of Worcester’s pronunciation, as follows:
600 Weorna Caestre
800 Werna Cestre
1000 Wira Cester
1200 Wir Cester
1400 Woo Cester
1600 Woocester
1800 Wooster
2000 W’ster
… but who knows how accurate that is 
Would “Whirr-a-Kess-ter” have been more accurate than the “Wor-chess-ter” we have in game? Who knows?
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Interesting, thanks… but I don’t agree with the decision, since the game is in modern English, not 13th century English, and I don’t think they’ve applied the principal of “authentic pronunciation” consistently, even in just the new campaigns.
The Last Kingdom did something similar to this, referring to Bamburgh as “Bebbanburg”, Exeter as “Exanceaster”, and so on. But in that, it was very obvious that they were doing it deliberately, because the words were spelt differently as well. In the Longshanks campaign, it’s not obvious that it isn’t an error – you actually have to read that blog post to be sure!
But the do apply it often, like the Khmer sounds more like “Khmai”, which runs counter to how it is written in the latin alphabet.
Most of the pronounciation has been done very well, in this game.