mahn-TEH-chello is how the locals say it.
Not “Dess Plaines,” but “DEZ Plaines.” You are pronouncing it with the sibilant “S” otherwise common in the Northwest Suburbs. However, that pronunciation could be discussed endlessly.
I said chello until around high school or college, when someone ‘corrected’ me. Then someone re-corrected me, and I started pronouncing it “that place Jefferson lived.”
I had no idea what it was, but seeing a word looking like that I’d always go for the “ch” variant.
This for me as well.
I pronounce it “Montichello”, though I often hear the nuclear plant of the same name pronounced “Montisello”.
Hi I’m new! Joined to chime in. Monticello is in fact pronounced like the instrument, monte-chello. I was born and raised in Charlottesville and have also done the tour several times. Nobody knows why Jefferson named his home Monticello, which means little hill in Italian. I do know that he was a huge fan of the Italian architect Andrea Palladio whose Villla Rotonda was somewhat replicated through Jefferson’s buildings. Thomas Jefferson is famous for his inventions/ideas/designs, but none of these are original. He did a lot of traveling in Europe and brought home his favorite things and replicated them in his home and on his campus.
♫ The posh panache of Jefferson at Monticello, bustin’ out a mile with style! ♫
Out of curiosity, how do you pronounce the name of the capital of Russia?
How about Moscow, Idaho?
Fiddle Mountain.
mmm
English has no pronunciation rules.
Just because the rules are complicated and have many exceptions doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Teaching phonics wouldn’t work, otherwise.
If there weren’t any such rules, concepts like Anglicization (of pronunciations) wouldn’t make sense.
I pronounce it the correct way.
The proper pronunciation is Monti-chello with one exception. The town of Monticello, Georgia, hometown of country singer Trisha Yearwood, is pronounced Monti-sello.
Georgia towns are often the exception to rules of pronunciation. Just by the spelling, the town of Cairo, Georgia would appear to sound just like the Cairo, Egypt…but instead it sounds like “Karo” as in Karo Syrup.
Then there’s Vidalia, Georgia, home of the world-famous sweet onion, that’s pronounced “Vi-day-a”. Or Albany, Georgia, which locals insist on saying as “Al-benny”.
But the oddest one of all is the small and sparsely populated Taliaferro County in rural South-Central Georgia. It is pronounced as “Tolliver”……