I’m quite a big fan of early blues music, including what’s known as the Piedmont Blues style, played by people like Blind Willie McTell, Blind Boy Fuller etc. I’ve been wondering recently though how the name Piedmont is actually pronounced in the region itself, is it anything like it’s written? I’m tempted to try and pronounce it like it’s a French word ‘pi-ay mon’ or something, but I’ve really no idea.
Does anyone know?
Pee’d-mont.
As in “I just peed” and count of mont-ee christo.
My cite is any newscast that features the Peidmont Triad in NC.
My cite is that I grew up there, and we pronounce it like Todderbob says: Peed-mont.
Thanks very much!
If I ever meet any blues aficionados I’ll be able to discuss the topic without the fear of sounding like an idiot now.
Peed-mahnt (which is the same as the other two are describing, just providing a different way of phonetisizing it)
and it’s not a french word, it’s etymology is latin/italian.
It’s written Piemonte in Italian, and pronounced as you’d expect for an Italian word. Piedmont is a more French-like spelling, even though according to the Wikipedia article about the Italian region it’s actually spelled Piémont in French. (As a French speaker, both Piémont and Piedmont look suitably French to me.)
And of course, both French and Italian being close descendants of Latin, the etymology of the word is quite apparent in both its Italian and French forms.
Virginian here, in the general vicinity of the fall line (edge of the piedmont).
Peed (as in the past tense of “pee”) Mont, as in the first syllable of “Montgomery”.
Thanks guys, that seems to be a pretty definitive set of answers . Looks like I was over thinking it going for the French.
This is a word that I learned in grade school, and have almost never heard of since. I guess it is important for the people who live there, but for the people that don’t, it’s exceedingly rare.
It’s used commonly in the botanical literature when refering to distribution of plants in the US.
Piedmont, Arizona was the ET virus’s ground zero in Crichton’s Andromeda Strain. I’ve read the book several times and never heard the name spoken aloud, but I always pronounced it peed-mont.
If you’re a blues lover it’s as important to be able to pronounce as baroque is to a classical music lover.