Cockburn

Why is the Ck dropped in some surnames of people so Cockburn is pronounced Co-burn...seems a little prudish to me

It's a Scottish name. I think it underwent a similar phonological change as happened with Edinburg becoming Edinboro in speech. Possibly the fact that the change became universal was helped along by the associations of "cock", which are old -- there's a Middle English poem, c. 1400, I haue a gentil cook (I have a noble cock) full of double entendres. here, with a translation.

In the US the name is often spelled Coburn or Cogburn. The first one may have arisen accidentally, just spelling the name phonetically, but the second (now usually given the spelling pronunciation Cog - burn, as with the John Wayne character in True Grit) looks like censorship.

I can understand people getting tired of jokes about their name. I wouldn't call it prudishness.

A celebrity in New Zealand whose name is Lana Cockroft has modified it to "Coc-Kroft" and insists that it's pronounced "Co-croft". I don't blame people for chnging that kind of name either- I'm amazed that there are people who seem happy with surnames like Hogg and Grubb.

From American Heritage (it eventually gets to a surname change)<blockquote>Quote
<hr>The word rooster is an Americanism, and its appearance in the written record toward the end of the eighteenth century helps signal a major cultural and linguistic change, as people began to be much more fastidious when speaking of sex, death, and their bodies. This is the period when bosom, limb, and donkey replaced breast, leg, and ass; when breeches and trousers became inexpressibles, unmentionables, and nether garments; when died was superseded on gravestones by passed away, laid to rest, and fell asleep; and when the sexually potent barnyard bull was converted into the cow brute, cow’s spouse, and gentleman cow.

The oldest example of rooster in The Oxford English Dictionary comes from the diary of a 12-year-old girl, Anna Green Winslow, who was sent in 1770 from her home in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to school in Boston. A bright and sensitive observer of the contemporary scene, she noted in her journal for March 14, 1772: “Their other dish … contain’d a number of roast fowls —half a dozen, we suppose, & all roosters at this season, no doubt.”

Rooster’s origin is self-evident, referring to the bird’s habit of perching on high (ultimately from the Old English hrost, the spars or rafters of a house). Anna certainly didn’t invent the word; she picked it up from her elders, who had begun using it in preference to cock, the bird’s traditional name for a millennium.
[snip]
Americans were far ahead of their British cousins in latching on to rooster. Fifty years after Anna’s observation, James Flint still felt that he had to explain to readers back home in his Letters From America (1822) that the “Rooster, or he-bird [is the] Cock, the male of the hen.”

This squeamishness led to a raft of other changes during the nineteenth century. For example, Americans began speaking of haystacks instead of haycocks; of children’s riding horses instead of cockhorses; of roaches and rooster-roaches instead of cockroaches; of rooster fighting instead of cockfighting; of the rooster of a gun rather than its cock; and of weather roosters and weathervanes instead of weathercocks. The nervousness even extended to people’s names. We know the author of Little Women as Louisa May Alcott because her father, Amos Bronson Alcott, changed his surname from Alcox, itself a euphemistic distortion of the earlier, more highly charged Alcocke (in turn, possibly, from Allcock).<hr></blockquote>

I have long felt sorry for the Trevor Itchyanus I read about in the UK magazine Private Eye. Sadly I can't prove or link the story.

It could be (although I'm not sure) that the "ck" in Cockburn was a transiliteration of a sound not present in English, but may have been in one of the old Scottish dialects or langauges. This, combined with the Anglicisation of the names (take Farquharson and Urquhart, for example) has led to it becoming Coburn.

Also, to #1, whilst the burgh part of Edinburgh can be (and often is) written as "boro", it's not really pronounced like that at all (although I have heard some Americans truely butcher it - if you're American, I don't mean offence), but it's more "Edinbruh", with the emphasis on the "Edin" and the "bruh" is somewhere between bruh and bra,really short, almost schwa-like. It's difficult for me to describe, as it just comes naturally to me.

<blockquote>Quote
<hr>the "bruh" is somewhere between bruh and bra,really short, almost schwa-like.<hr></blockquote>
I believe it is actually a schwa.

My newly-acquired Oxford Names Companion, incorporating the Oxford dictionaries of surnames, first names, and British place names, says: habitation name from a place in the former county of Berwicks. . . . so called from OE coce cock (or the byname Cocca [itself from from coce] + burna stream. The surname is normally pronounced [koburn; can't manage IPA here], apparently to veil the imagined indelicacy of the first syllable. So I was wrong in adducing Edinburgh and #5 was wrong in guessing at a particularly Scottish consonant.