Talk:Strachan
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In 1966, the Honorable John R. Strachan, Sr. was appointed Postmaster of Manhattan by U.S. Postmaster Lawrence O'Brien and Senator Robert Kennedy. Strachan was the first African-American to hold this high position. 184.97.190.228 (talk) 04:13, 12 October 2010 (UTC)
Pronunciation
[edit]First heard this pronounced Strawn yesterday, but then I'm an expat... No surprise there, but what does surprise me is 'Strak-han'. This seems very unlikely. Perhaps the aspirated sound, as in loch, is intended? And/or just Strakkan? Rothorpe (talk) 19:22, 2 March 2014 (UTC)
As a Strachan myself, I can give some history of the derivation/pronunciation of the name - though I can't give a source. I have a always pronounced it Strawn. At university in 1979, I met a Scottish guy who was reading history and on being introduced, I said to him that as you're a Scot I expect you will insist on saying it's pronounced Strakhan. However he said that was not necessarily the case. There is a village close to Aberdeen of the same name, which has always been pronounced Strawn. According to him, the original spelling of the place name was StraThan (like Strath-Clyde) - meaning something like "Across the brook". That would have been pronounced Strawn or Straan. The T got corrupted to a C due to a cartographer's error as the gallic runes for T and C look similar. The pronunciation remained the same. Then a whole group of families from Denmark arrived in the 17th century (I think) and settled there and took their surnames from the place. As the families spread over Scotland, the pronunciation then corrupted to Strak-han - as the "ch" is gutteral as in "loch". Apparently my own family were always "Strakhan" or "Strakkan" in pronunciation, but changed it to "Strawn" on moving to Bristol at the turn of the 20th Century. Unfortunately I do not have a citable reference for the spelling, then pronunciation corruption. Alan1507 (talk) 10:24, 23 March 2014 (UTC)
Variants
[edit]The musician, Billy Strayhorn, probably was named with a variant of Strachan.J. D. Crutchfield | Talk 15:55, 13 January 2023 (UTC)