In
The Harrap Book of Boys' and Girls' Names, by Charles Johnson and Linwood Sleigh, there is a very interesting information:
"The eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon's friends addressed him as
Eddard, the polite pronunciation of the period, which survived among old-fashioned speakers well into the 1800s."
Nowadays, is this pronunciation used in some place or by some people (high English nobility, for instance)?
Lumia
http://onomastica.mailcatala.com