Something that has intrigued me for a while now since the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, has received such high media profile. That is, the strange pronunciation of Colin.
It is spelt Colin, yet pronounced colon (KOH-lon) by all the reporters and news presenters in Australia. This is always a bit of a giggle. Is this just an Australian stuff-up or does he really pronounce his name the same as a part of the bowel?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/onpolitics/elections/gop2000guide/powellpost.htm
Always happy to hear the sort of thing that our Down Under Dopers find amusing.
So, as the eminent DDG points out but doesn’t say, it’s the lin vs. lon that matters.
Only a colon would pronounce it KOH-lon.
As an Aussie, I can assure you that the usual pronounciation of this name would be Col’n. I was just as surprised as the rest of the world that our newsreaders were suddenly pronouncing it as though it was part of the lower gastrointestinal tract.
Having said that, I do know that at least two of our networks go to great pains to check on the correct manner in which to pronounce names. Thus, when Lady Di married Prince Charles, we were informed that her name was correctly said Dee-anna, not Die-anna.
I always thought that “Rohan” was correctly pronounced as if it was a variant on “Rowan”, because during my teen years it was a common name, there was a famous West Indian cricketer with that name, and that’s the way the BBC pronounced it. I was diabused of that notion when someone who IS West Indian told me that it’s correctly pronounced “row-harn”.
My daughter’s name is Tahnee. I chose to spell it that rather than the original Maori spelling (Tane) because I didn’t want her to go through life being called “Tain”, and most people recognise the “ee” as an “ay” sound. Except when they don’t - thus she’s lived a life condemned to being called “Tar-NEE”.
Colon? Col’n? Who - apart from himself and his parents can know how it was INTENDED to be pronounced? We only know it’s OH-PRA and not “opera” because the person is famous enough to tell us so.
What does amuse me ATM, is that “colon” has now become the default in Australia, even when newsreaders are referring to people who have always been “col’n” in the past.
Kim Gyngell would have a field day with this.
One thing you might not realize is that Colin isn’t a very common name in the U.S. It’s usually pronounced Cah-lin rather than Coe-lin, but when I hear about someone in the U.S. with the name, I expect most of the time to hear that it’s someone who immigrated to the U.S. from the U.K. or some such. Colin Powell’s parents were from Jamaica, where Colin is a more common name, and they pronounced it Cah-lin. The news stories I’ve read said that it wasn’t till Powell joined the army that people there began pronouncing his name Coe-lin in imitation of Colin Kelly.
According to the BBC, he pronounces his own name “in the British manner”. Whatever that means.
American born Colin (that’s Cah-lin) here.
I’ll just say that Colin Kelly pushed my cause back 20 years with this crap. Every damn teacher I ever had in school mispronounced my name.
FWIW, I have heard Colin Powell pronounce his name KO-lon. I’d always assumed he pronounced it KAH-lin and that the media were messing it up; but I heard the pronunciation from his own lips when he was on television once. (I think he was swearing in or something.)
I’m having trouble following these phonetic spellings. Let’s try another tack.
In general, I think, before Colin Powell, Americans were more likely to say “Colin” (usually to the Englishman who bore that name) to rhyme with “fallin’.” The Secretary of State’s name is usually pronounced to rhyme with “bowlin’.”
So the difference, to Americans, it’s the change in the pronunciation of the first syllable, not the second syllable, that makes it sound like “colon.”