Budapest or Budapesht? Kiper Belt or Kuiper Belt? Houseton or Hyouston? Van Wick or Van Whyk? The last two are kind of New York specific. Me, I pronounce them all the first way. What pronunciation controversies are going on in your neck of the woods.
Budapest, kyoo-ih-purr belt, Hyooston (Texas), Van Wick.
I’ve never heard Houston pronounced any other way than “Hyouston”. Do people really say “House-ton”?
Are these the same people who pronounce Arkansas “Are-kansas”?
Anyway: Budapest, Kiper Belt, Hyouston, Van Wick .
There is a street in Manhattan spelled Houston and it is pronounced House-ton. If you call it Hyooston, you will be corrected.
It doesn’t matter.
Especially names that come from non-English sources, like Budapest. People who speak Hungarian say it a different way than people whose tongue is only capable of forming American English phonemes.
I’m a fairly educated speaker, I don’t have any problem with people saying eye-rack (Iraq), for the same reason I accept Italy and Iceland pronounced according to English phonetics. Who made the rule, about which countries can be pronounced with English stylization, and which have to preserve the pure form from the native speakers. Do you say may-hee-ko (Mexico) in casual English conversastion? Pa-ree (Paris)? Should you trill your R when you say foreign names?
For the New York ones, the street is indeed not pronounced like the Texas City. It’s House-ton. As for the other, I always said Van Wick and have heard the alternative but have no idea which is “official”.
Houston and Budapest are completely different issues. Local people pronounce their own names according to local custom. When you’re away from the locality, and its local pronunciation is unknown to most people, there is nothing wrong with saying it in a way that your listeners expect it to be.
Lafayette is a great example. There are dozens of Lafayettes aroiund the country, each one with own local usage. Different places are /lah-fe-yet/, and /laugh-yet/ and /la-FAY-et/ and the county in north Florida is pronounced /la-FEET/ by old-timers, but is changing with new demographics taking hold.
The Wisconsin town where I grew up (Waupun) has undergone a local change,and when I go back there, I hear local peoplle saying it different from what I was used to. What happened, was that in preliterate times, when few people could read, the vernacular pronunciation shifted away from the phonetic, and now readers have a tendency to drift it back into conformity with the spelling.
Missouri is the classic example of a place where the indigenous population is divided on how they say the name of where they come from. And the differences are trucial, with nobody ever “correcting” anyone else. (Why isn’t “trucial” a dictionary word? There was once a country called “The Trucial States”, meaning they coesixted under a truce agreement. Now the UAE.)
Nearby town, spelled Delhi.
Pronounced: Del-high !
(Confuses the hell out of Indian immigrants, I’m sure!)
No-treh Dahm, always, even for Hoosiers. Noter Daym is meaningless gibberish (“Dame” is a word; “Noter” is not).
It is very common in the US for names adopted from foreign places to have different local pronunciations. There’s also a ‘del-high’ in Louisiana. Other examples are:
Berlin NH (BURR-lin
Cairo IL/GA (KAY-ro)
Glasgow MT (rhymes with cow)
New Madrid MO (MAD-rid)
Palestine TX (-teen)
Belgrade MT (-graid)
New Prague MN (praig)
Tripoli TX (try-poley)
Cabool MO (not like Kabul)
Lima OH (lye-ma)
Chili NY (chy-lye)
La Canada CA (la-can-YOD-a)
Tampico IL (TAMP-ico)
Vienna IL (vye-ENN-a)
Rio WI (RYE-o)
Montevideo MN (monty video)
Hayti MO (hay-tye)
Versailles KY (ver-SAILS)
Also, from other well-known US place names:
Nevada MO (ne-VAY-da)
Miami KS , OK (miama)
Arkansas City KS (ar-KAN-zus)
I always say Budapesht these days after hearing it so often from people who have spent time there.
For the city in Texas, of course it’s Hyouston. But yes, to confirm: Houston Street in Manhattan is pronounced House-ton. (That’s what SoHo means, “South of Houston.”)
1 and 2 are questions of whether it’s legitimate to have accepted English pronunciations of foreign words differing from the original or whether they should all eventually be ‘corrected’. The former idea says it’s Budapest and Kiper in English, though one might debate whether 2 is established enough to fit under the rule.
-
As several have mentioned, the city in Texas is Hewston, the street in NY is Houseton, that’s been true since way back, and calling either by the other pronunciation is a mistake.
-
This is a case of a local pronunciation that isn’t original but became dominant, Van Wick, I’ve never heard a regular NY native (like myself) say Wike. But the namesake, late 1890’s mayor Robert Anderson Van Wyck, pronounced it Van Wike and his descendants have lobbied for news orgs pronounce the road that way, which is why you sometimes hear it that way now. In Dutch it wouldn’t be exactly Wick or Wike.
I feel Budapesht is different from, say, Paree for Paris or Berleen for Berlin. It’s a much more subtle change.
Seizing on just this one from the list: can anyone tell “yea or nay” re the following, to a curious Brit (a question which I raised in a another recent “pronunciation” thread, but had no answer there)?
Am I right in understanding that in the state of Arkansas, the name is pronounced “AR-kan-saw”; but in places further west, concerning the name where it occurs in those places (as it does frequently, with the source of the Arkansas River being high up in the Rockies) – it’s pronounced, as above, “ar-KAN-zus” – or is the matter less simple and clear-cut. than that?
It’s a relatively subtle change, but I don’t see a difference in principal from the other two. If anything I’d say Berlin is the odd one out among those three because it’s purely modifying vowel sounds which differ among English speakers and over time anyway. But ‘st’ is not ‘sht’ in English, and an ending ‘s’ isn’t just left off the way it often is in French. The question in both cases is whether English speakers have to make special modifications to the rule of pronouncing a given spelling in order to be correct because the original language does.
I agree Budapesht sounds a little less of an affectation by an English speaker than Paree, but no way is Budapest an incorrect English pronunciation.
AFAIK the river is commonly called R-Kansas in Kansas, kind of naturally, and the town of Arkansas City, Kansas is pronounced that way. There seems some dispute whether that’s common in Colorado. The state’s pronunciation is officially AR-ken-saw.
However, local lore says that though the town was named Berlin in the first half of the 1800s, this pronunciation wasn’t adopted until WWII.
The Delhi in New York is also pronounced del-high.
Can you please explain the difference in these two Van Wick or Van Whyk? I would pronounce them the same.
Houseton, we’ve had a problem. 