People look down on Kentuckians who call their town Ver-SAYLES. Don't they know it's Ver-SIGH?
Really? And do they themselves say Pa-REE for the capital of that country? Do they say Moskva - and how do you pronounce "Moskva" anyway, Jasper? - for the towns in Maine and Idaho? Here in NH, that paper mill city on the Androscoggin River is pronounced BER-lin. When I was a child, I thought the Germans just said that wrong.
Roma, Firenze, Torino...
I learned to put the "sh" sound into both Budapest and Bucharest two decades ago through repetition and not wanting to sound wrong to the people there. So then I come back to America and these sound like something of an affectation. Wrong either way, I suppose.
What's the name and pronunciation of the biggest city in France in French? In English? In German?
ReplyDeleteIs someone from England "British" or a "rosbif?"
I think it depends on your audience.
BTW, I've been through Cay-ro, but never been in Egypt.
In Georgia DeKalb is "de-CAB," in Illinois it is "de-CALB." In Atlanta, the street that is named after a famous Spanish explorer is pronounced "ponce d' LEE-on." Most just say "Ponce." The vagaries are rather charming, really, except that some must feel superior to others because they pronounce things differently.
ReplyDeleteI think it should be obvious that the local pronunciation is definitive for people who speak the language of the locality, but that a foreign language can use any signifier it likes. I once drove a rather supercilious British woman through Skaneateles, New York, and was much amused by her imperious rejection of local usage. She ruled that the locals should say Skan-at'-eles. With that said, I think English speakers are entirely in their rights to speak of Burma, Bombay and Peking. No one blinks when someone calls the capital of my wife's native country Vienna, but you will be met with strong words if you fail to correctly pronounce certain toponymic innovations. Both of these errors are actually mispronunciations in one's own language, and I'd say both are rather unseemly expressions of personal pride.
ReplyDelete@Shawna:
ReplyDeleteYou’re right. This video has more examples of amazing pronunciations from Georgia.
https://youtu.be/tTSuB6mgjH4
One of my favorites is a now-unincorporated town in Forsyth County memorialized only on an old Coca-Cola roadsign. It’s “Cuba, Georgia,” which is of course pronounced “CUBE-ee.”
ReplyDeletejames
ReplyDeleteBTW, I've been through Cay-ro, but never been in Egypt.
But you have been through Little Egypt,a.k.a. Southern Illinois, have you not?
Which reminds me of Billy Neely's song. Never Left The Lone Star State.
Well I drove my truck to Italy and on to Naples fair
There I went to Palestine to get some good fresh air ...
Well I stopped in China...
Colombo (Columbus?) was so beautiful, Riviera what a sight
Paris was the gayest place, especially at night..
Well I rambled into Portland, San Diego, and San Juan...
I visited all those places and never left the Lone Star State
(Maybe that is the way Columbus TX is pronounced there. I have heard Refugio pronounced as Re-fury-o.)
While I speak Spanish and have worked in Latin America, here in the US I generally pronounce Spanish language place names in a USA-English accent. No "Nee-carrr-a-gwa" for me.At least one exception: Buenos Aires. (Bueno Sai-res). I just heard it pronounced that way too often for it not to stick.
Yes, I have plenty of cousins there.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of different pronunciations, I am reminded of the story of someone from the Bay Area who spent 5th or 6th grade in the Philadelphia area, due to a father's transfer. In social studies, some California place names came up. The Philadelphia kids pronounced San Jose as in San Joez- just as such spelling would be pronounced in English. The kid from the Bay Area informed them that was NOT the correct pronunciation. He gave them the Bay Area hybrid Spanish/English pronunciation: San Hosay. The Philadelphia kids reaction was, "You pronounce it the way you want to, and we will pronounce it the way we want to."
ReplyDeleteThere is, of course, an alternative pronunciation and spelling in Spanish. Which is after all, the language of origin of that city. Spelling: San José. (The A and the J are pronounced differently in Spanish.)
@ JMSmith - My wife lived in Skaneateles as a child and we just visited there this spring. Place names based on Native terms are often very approximate to begin with, as it was usually not the people of highest learning who were first on the scene to learn what the current occupants called a place. They wrote what the heard phonetically, and linguists would later untangle it a century or two later. To claim that a word that was roughly rendered into English letters should then revert to a pronunciation that those English letters would suggest to another person two hundred years later does not seem very precise.
ReplyDeleteThe name means "long lake," BTW. We humans are very unoriginal in our naming. Rio Grande = Big River. Lake Superior = Big Lake, (or "upper lake," but probably not) etc.
A favorite old topic of mine. River-River https://assistantvillageidiot.blogspot.com/2007/02/river-river.html
That’s true. I used to give my wife a hard time about how unimaginative the place names were in Indiana —White River, Blue River, Buck Creek. But if you translate the Cherokee names for rivers I grew up with, well it turns out..,
ReplyDeleteWell, DANG-IT, all town names should be spelled with NO MORE than 6 letters...and pronounced however-the-hell ya wanna. SHEEEEEEEESH.
ReplyDeleteIn Iowa it's Nuh-vay-duh, not like the state, Mad-rid, not like the city in Spain, and Cah-manch, not like the Oklahoma Indian tribe. Des Moines is pronounced per French (no Z/S sound) but I believe the suburb of Chicago is pronounced Dez Plainez. The city in Wisconsin named for the famous German city is pronounced Ber-lun, though I bet that was adopted around 1918 or so (A town named Germania near my hometown in Iowa changed its name to Lakota in 1919 for the same reason).
ReplyDeleteAnd it's LOU-vuhl or Lou-ville in Kentucky rather than Louis-ville.
A lot of geographical features were named by people who didn't get around much, and so needed to differentiate only a small set of local features. "Big River" is just fine when your world includes only one big river. It seems unsatisfactory when your horizon expands and your world takes in many big rivers. Time has a way of curing this, though, since many toponyms outlive their original semantic context and become highly individualist proper names. Sahara means "desert," but it is pedantic to condemn "Sahara desert" as a pleonasm. In the United States, a great many features are named for ordinary people. This is, of course, very American, but "Smith Creek" may be said to lack poetry. Yet it is possible that the name of "Smith Creek" will outlive the Smith surname (or at least our pronunciation of it), and then it will seem very romantic.
ReplyDeleteThere are probably other examples of this one, but I lived for a time in the small Utah town of Monticello. We pronounced it with an "s" (Montisello) rather than the "ch" as you would for Thomas Jefferson's estate (Montichello).
ReplyDeleteI like to say it's because we speak third best Italian there.
In Tennessee we have a city called Lafayette--and that's "Luh-FAY-et".
ReplyDeleteOf course, we also have a Maury County, pronounce "Murry".
Don't even start on Demonbreun Street.
--Tennessee Budd