827: macKenzie Mar 14, 2017

English speakers—and speakers in general—will speak regardless orthography. There are a few instances, however, where the spelling has changed the way people pronounce or at least perceive pronunciation. When the printing press spread, predominantly from Germany, Flanders, and France, they did not include some characters that were used in the British Isles like þ, ð, or ƿ which you can see more on here: Caxton Printing. Substitutions had to be made; in the three examples before, all of them were replaced with what approximated that sound, TH for the first two and W for the last. The letter ʒ (yogh) however was written with a Y, a GH to represent the sounds; in fact the spelling name for the letter coincidentally contains the two main sounds it represented. Also—and mostly in Scotland—yogh was replaced with a Z. This led to the change in many spellings which you can still see in the abbreviation for the Shetland Islands. The pronunciations remained entirely the same for most words, but the pronunciation for the name MacKenzie gradually changed from its original Mackenʒie when English people saw it enough in writing.