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sort of reminds me of a phenomenon surrounding the name of a town near where I live. The town is named Lafayette, which should be correctly pronounced something like la-fye-ETT, but which is pronounced by the natives phonetically, La-FAY-it. (I live in the south and we turn our e's to i's all the time.) The thing is, I live in Alabama, and almost everyone in Lafayette has a really strong accent; almost always when you hear FAY-it, it is actually just Fett stretched out and twanged by the dialect. So those of us without strong southern accents calmly and automatically correct the phonetic La-FAY-it to La-FETT.
So we're actually pretty wrong!
Anyway.

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I had a teach in HS surnamed St. John and everyone just said Saint John. Sinjin wouldn't have occurred to me before I was a namenerd

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In general I think it's pretty OK to adopt names into your own language rules.