http://www.phlf.org/phlfnews/essays/pittsburg.html
(My point was that “-burgh” endings are the original English versions, and that the use of “-burg” is mainly an American thing.)
465 hits for Noo Yoik. Heh.
Well, not enough to get it on the list, but “Ronoake VA” gets 121 hits, “Ronoke” gets 69, and “Ronoak” gets a dozen. Still not as bad as the Domino’s Pizza flyer from a few years back that listed their address as “Ronak”, though.
There are 155 instances on the SDMB of “Cincinatti”; I didn’t check for other misspellings.
65,500 hits on Worchester (but I’m sure there is a town spelled that way somewhere, and there seems to be a Maryland country by that name)
29,300 hits for Worchester, MA (without quotes)
13,700 hits for “Worchester, MA” (with quotes)
And that’s not even asking anyone to pronounce it correctly.
Re: Pittsburgh, I wonder which changed first - the spelling or the pronunciation? By that I mean, how long has it been pronounced “Pitz-berg” rather than “Pitz-b’ruh”, which is how “-burgh” is normally pronounced in English (eg Edinburgh). Anyone know about the history of the name?
Well, my father was born in Llanelli, so I probably would have got it correct…
It’s not a city, but my own personal rant:
45 hits for Massachusettes on SDMB!
It’s not like it’s a state you don’t see in the news…
A quick Google shows that (unlike I expected), it’s a home-grown American place name, earlier being called Fort Pitt. So I guess it’s possible that it’s always been pronounced that way.
(FWIW, the English place name ‘Burgh’ is pronounced berg.)
Plus, you can use this handy-dandy mnemonic:
m-a-crooked letter-crooked letter-ACHOO!-sniff-plural feminine dimunitive
I just don’t see how anyone could ever misspell Masssa… Massashoe… it.
For six months I mailed letters to my brother in Old Ford, PA instead of Old Forge!
ok. while we’re at it:
223,000 hits for saskachewan;
44,400 hits for “british colombia” ;
15,000 for nunavit;
15,000 for ontarrio -smith as there seems to be a football player by that name, God help us;
7780 for newfound land (although many of these seem to be where the word was broken at the end of a line: Newfound- / land)
6420 hits for quebeck -tn -tennessee (there’s a Quebeck, Tennessee);
5480 hits for nunavat;
4600 hits for onterio;
3230 hits for albetra;
3200 hits for ablerta;
2650 hits for manatoba
2360 hits for menitoba;
1770 hits for youkon -gmc as there appears to be a car by that name;
1670 hits for saskatchawan
857 hits for labrodor;
506 hits for nova scottia;
352 hits for nova scocia;
266 hits for alburta – again, some of which are people’s names;
262 hits for “new brunswik” -jersey -nj.
Nacodoches TX gets 2340
Nagadoches TX manages a measly 294
Thank You! It took me a long time learn to spell Albuquerque, so why in god’s name did they name a State Massa… Whatever.
That one amused me…didn’t 400 hits for “new brunswik”, all of which linked to non-Canadian refernces, give them the slightest hint they’d spelt it wrong? :smack:
Actually I take that all back, realising it’s bollocks…
But in any case, the search for ‘“New Brunswik” -jersey -nj’ produced plenty of results. Not least due to most sites relating to Rutgers University evidently including the misspelling in their meta tags. Plus pages like [urlhttp://www.socialpsychology.org/socprogs.htm]this getting the spelling wrong.
Hmm… I tried searching for “Grant’s Pass” but the search engines ignore the apostrophe. Judging by the first page it looks like more than 10% of Lycos’ 16565 results and almost half of Google’s 2540 results are spelled wrong.
Slight hijack hear, er, here, I’ve hear natives pronounce theirs like this:
Pittsburgh - Pissburgh
Roanoke - Runnick
Newburyport - New Report (as reported above)
And try pronouncing Scituate (SIT choo it) , Salisbury (Solsberry), Chicopee (accent on the CHIC) (all in MA), Dunedin (FL) - Dunn EE din, not Dune din, Conetoe (NC) Kun EE tuh.
Probably worth a separate posting.
Honalulu = 7,480
This one won’t count, but it’s still funny to me. In eighth grade I had the coolest teacher, who would read back some of the funnier wrong answers on tests at the end of the day. We were doing a series of refresher tests and one included the 50 states and capitals. His instructions, I’m guessing to head off some of the wrong answers he’d gotten in the past were, “The capital of Washington is not Seattle (this is in Washington State). Spelling counts, and to be nice I’ll go ahead and tell you now, the capital of Oklahoma is Oklahoma City.”
While reading back the results, he fake blushed as he read to us. Apparently one person in our class believed the states on the east coast otherwise known as Virginia and West Virginia to the rest of the class, were known as Vagina and West Vagina.
West Vagina = 308,000 (majority for the Vagina Monologues)
“West Vagina” = 148