We have a 'Bow' river. And there are bows in rivers generally. I wonder if the head of a river (Bow like archery) might have been part of a Bow pronunciation. Not sure where the whale actually got its name.

On Thu, Sep 10, 2020 at 2:09 PM Phil Pugliese - philpugliese at yahoo.com (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:
Reminds me of the 'Bowhead Whale'.

Every time I can recall hearing it, it is pronounced as if it was like a long'bow' but I'm pretty positive that the name refers the 'bow' of a ship!

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On Thursday, September 10, 2020, 08:00:36 AM MST, Timothy Collinson - timothy.collinson at port.ac.uk (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:




On Thu, 10 Sep 2020 at 15:05, James Catchpole - jlcatchpole at googlemail.com (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:

All I can say to you is "bow, bow, bow, bough, through, enough"! ;^D



You've sort of beaten me to pointing out one of my favourites with international friends learning English:

thorough
through
though
tough
ough

all with the vowel spelled the same, all (with the vowel sound) pronounced differently.  And that's before you start *adding* letters back in.... like Lough.

tc

(To be fair, I find the difference between the 'ou' sound in thorough and the one in tough quite hard to distinguish but I think it's about tongue placement or something.)

(Can anyone tell I've got a video recording to make that I'm not wanting to do...?)

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