Sangamon County, Illinois has been in the national news lately after a county deputy shot and killed a woman over a pot of boiling water. I don’t expect people from outside of Central Illinois to be familiar with local pronunciation of (probably, maybe) Pottawotamie words, but nevertheless, the way I’ve heard it pronounced just grates my gears. Usually it’s something along the lines of “SAG-uh-mon” (last syllable rhymes with “con” or “don” in this butchered pronunciation).
After you’ve answered, please listen to this newscaster, she gets it right.
It’s SANG-uh-muhn, the vowel sound in the later syllables being schwas.
That exactly how I read it in my head and I have never seen that name before. Seems like it’s pronounced exactly how it’s spelled. I don’t know why anyone would think it would be “SAG.” There’s an N there.
I live in Illinois and that is how I have always heard it pronounced. That does not make it right, just how everyone seems to pronounce it that I have ever heard (I know, anecdotal).
I’ve never heard the word (although I grew up in Illinois) but just based on the spelling I would pronounce it like “cinnamon” except the first syllable as SANG rather than SIN (/'sæŋəmən/).
I’d definitely have put the primary accent on the first syllable, and the second de-accented enough to be a schwa, but I’d put a secondary stress on the final syllable, and pronounce it like the first syllable of “Montana”.
The correct pronunciation of a place name is the pronunciation used by the residents of that place. That may or may not be the correct pronunciation of the Pottawaotamie word it’s derived from, but the place name is not the same as whatever that word was, so it can have a different pronunciation.
I could imagine a legit pronunciation being something close to “SAN guh Mon” or “SAN Guh mun” where the "u"s are pretty much schwas.
We now know from other local posters that those are not correct pronunciations. But at least they use all the letter/sounds in the correct order. Unlike “SAG-anything”.
Yup. Like “cinnamon” (as @markn_1 said), or “Oregon.” I lived the majority of my life in Sangamon County (and just now got back from visiting my mother there), and I know that the “mon” pronunciation marks you as “not from there.”
By the way, @HeyHomie, do you live in a part of Missouri that pronounces its final vowel as a schwa?
Yeah, my instinct was like Chronos: SANG-uh-MON. But, if I’d thought about it for a second before reading the actual answer, I might have figure it out. City names are not generally pronounced like Digimon. The suffice -mon in a city name is usually muhn.
I concentrated too much on the first syllable, wondering if it was sang or sahng/song, thinking maybe it was from another language. I didn’t think about syllabic stress.
