After listening to some old radio shows today, I noticed the announcer would always say somthing like "courtesy “KMX” Los Angeles. But pronounce it with a, I guess you call it hard G. In other words a G like in “greg” not a G as pronounced by the letter J.
The latest show was from 1947 and it was KHJ Los Angeles with a hard G. At first I thought it was probably just a mispronounced, but I also heard some local stuff on something called a Don Lee Station and they pronounced it with a “G” instead of the “J”
So was Los Angeles ever pronounced with a hard G like Greg? Or is that just a local variation that was always just a wrong way of saying it.
I remember in a Bugs Bunny cartoon that Bugs pronounced Los Angeles with a hard “G” as well. Hearing it from him, I always thought it was a comical mispronounciation, but perhaps not.
I grew up in L.A., and I recall that the station identification announcers for one of the local, non-network-affiliated TV stations would pronounce it Loos (long O sound, as opposed to “loss”) Angle-eze. They were doing it this way until I moved away in 1997. I never took Spanish, so please correct me if I’m wrong, but I understand this the more latinized pronunciation.
Turner Classic Movies played a short film this weekend (about the unAmerican evils of gossiping during WWII)
It was based on a potential Japanese attack on Los Angeles…The opening scene had the narrator pronouncing it with the hard “g.” It was a serious film that I believe was historically accurate…at least in the pronunciation department.
I used to work with a woman of Hispanic descent who lived in San Pedro. She used to get peeved when people pronounced the name of her city as ‘San Pey-dro’.
weird, I heard something similar on the radio today, Seattle station kexp had Frank Black on and he was commenting on his song Los Angles and it was pronounced with the hard G. he said he was trying for an older style and had Perry Mason in mind when he went with that pronounciation.
The original El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora La Reina de Los Angeles de Portiuncula was of course pronounced in the Spanish manner: lohse ann-khay-lays, with a guttural “jota” sound like in Jose celebrating Chanukah. As the community became more “Anglo,” it replaced that non-standard-in-English consonant with the closest approximation, a hard “G”, retaining the long vowel in “Los” and giving the pronunciation asked about in the OP. This was, I’m given to understand, the native Southern Californian pronunciation before the area got the heavy immigration of the 1930s and later. That massive influx, though, with people who considered that the city of their destination was called “Laws Angie-Lee’s,” overwhelmed native usage, which became archaic within the lifetime of the oldest of us Dopers.
(No proof, no cite, for the above; it’s put together from an impression gathered from decades of reading, including a number of books on quite different subjects which referenced in passing what native Southern Californians said.)
As a SoCal native, I’ve always pronounced it with a soft ‘g’. I remember watching Dragnet, with Jack Webb saying ‘This is the city. Los An(j)eles, California’, and the various station identifications (we could pick up KTTV, KCOP and KTLA in San Diego) using the soft ‘g’.
Well, it was pronounced that way when it was part of Nueva España and later of Mexico. And it’s still pronounced that way when it’s mentioned in a Spanish conversation (but then, and as Will Smith correctly reflected in a song, we also say “Miami” instead of “Mayami”).
Yes, but a T / C alternation before I isn’t unheard of. The two are very similar in some late medieval / early modern lettering, and in some languages (Late Latin being one) TI+vowel / CI+vowel are pronounced similarly, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Portiúncula is an etymological spelling for what is pronounced Porciúncula. Cf. French -tion (pron. syõ, with etymological [t]) / Spanish -ción (pron. syón).
The one I find strange is Vallejo, California, where the “ll” takes the English pronunciation, but the “j” takes the Spanish.
California is full of Spanish place names with more-or-less mangled pronunciations. I used to work for a store in La Jolla (pronounced “hoya”). It was amusing when I ordered merchandise and had to spell the city name to baffled out-of-staters.
If you go down Calaveras Boulevard, turn right onto Piedmont Road, then right on Landess Avenue, and right onto Calle de Cuestanada, you’ll wind up in a place a lot of people simply cannot get to because they get an aneurism parsing the driving directions. My favourite is after spending five minutes on the phone conveying how to spell “Calle de Amor” is the question “So, is that street or drive or what?”. I think vague familiarity with Spanish geographical markers should be a requirement before entering the state of California. I’d love to stay and chat but I gotta go get some lunch down in sun-dzhozie. :rolleyes: