Houston street in New York pronounced house-ton. Houston, Texas pronouced hue-ston. Why the difference?
The earliest reference I can find to the name "Houston" is a town in Scotland founded in the 1700s, but it was named after a village that was there in the 11th century. It was named Hugh's Town, after Hugo De Padvinan, a Norman knight who established his home there. "Hugh's Town" eventually became "Houston." But the Norman Invasion (which brought Sir Hugo to Great Britain as an occupier) wrought tremendous changes in the English language, to its vocabulary, its grammar... and its phonetics. For a couple of centuries French was the official language of Angle Land in business, education and government, and Anglisc was only spoken by the common folk. There were no classes, no books, no dictionaries, no standards, and each region developed its own dialect. Many words and many names came to have alternate pronunciations in the different dialects. Eventually the Normans assimilated and adopted English--there was no discontinuity in government and today many English people from all walks of life have French ancestry and even French names. When London became the seat of government the London dialect of English became the prestigious one, and today Received Pronunciation or "RP," what we Americans call "Oxford English" or "BBC English," is considered the standard dialect of British English. But if you go 100 miles from the capital, you may encounter people who do NOT speak RP, and they still pronounce words and names differently from the people in London or the ones you hear on BBC television in the USA. Family members have traveled in different directions to find work, love, education or adventure, and after a few generations the pronunciation of their surnames have diverged from the original--in different ways. Linda Lovelace, Patty Loveless, and Lucy Lawless all bear the same surname! Houston, Texas, was named after Sam Houston, a hero of the Texas war of independence from Mexico, and the first president of the Republic of Texas. (It did not immediately join the USA after secession, and it remains our only state which has seceded from TWO countries. This is why, in Rick Perry's high school yearbook, his classmates wrote about him: "Most likely to secede." Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!) Houston Street in NYC is not famous enough to be listed in Wikipedia, but it was obviously named after someone else with the name Houston, who pronounces it differently. There are even people who spell it "Huston."
