You have be careful with place name pronunciations in Maryland because
the locals can be really stupid about it.
The most notorious example is the way many Baltimore natives pronounce
the name of the city: BAWmer, implying a spelling of something like “Baumer”.
My mother got unnecessarily lost there because more than one idiot told her
to do such-and-such when she got to “BAWmer” Avenue and it took the poor
lady 2-3 stops for directions before she figured it out.
Some Baltimorian must have moved to High Point NC where once long ago
I asked for directions and was told to do such-and-such at AWbertson Rd.
I assumed that would be spelled “Aubertson” as in “Auburn”, and got hopelessly
lost. I doubled back and asked the same asshole to spell it. There was a short,
uncivil end to that conversation when I found out he meant “Albertson” Rd.
Come to think of it Norfolk VA natives often pronounce the name of the dump NAWfuck,
and they are not joking-- I have heard local newscasters pronounce it that way.
Some holdover from colonial-era English maybe. Or It could be toxic polluted seafood
or excess sodium content in the air, I guess.
True, but that’s because Anne is so common and old, and we grew up knowing it.
Contrast that with Zoe, which gained popularity relatively recently, and for a long while I presumed it was just one syllable. (“Zoh”, as opposed to the much more common two-syllable “Zo-ee”)
Well, yeah, and that’s why I look askance at someone asking how to pronounce it. If the county were named Zoe Arundel, I wouldn’t be raising an eyebrow at copperwindow.
What about those Delaware weirdoes who pronounce Newark “new ark”? Crazy, right?
I have in my life encountered one or two incidences of the name “Anne” being pronounced as “Annie” (and it wasn’t a nickname, that’s just how she pronounced it). But it is overwhelmingly the case that the names “Anne” and “Ann” cannot be distinguished aurally.
Comes into English from, I presume, the French where it is spelled “Zoë”. We sometimes drop the umlaut (or whatever the French call it), and so the pronunciation is a bit confusing if you haven’t encountered it before.
As for “Norfolk”, my experience is that locals (in VA, that is) pronounce it NAW-fick, not NAW-fuck. And Marylanders, for some strange reason, have an almost Canadian way of pronouncing “house” and “about”.
I was pretty sure Anne was sometimes pronounced like Ann, but I didn’t know that it was always pronounced like Ann. When it come to names with silent letters, all bets are off with me, with the exception of the h in John. My name is Arthur and when I was a little kid in school I would always spell my name “Zarthur” and I claimed that the Z was silent.
I’ve been away from MD for a long time. When I saw a MD tag on a car I asked the driver where they were from and it took me a second to remember where the “Aston Shaw” was.
At some point, peple have started referring to Montgomery Co as “Moco.” I refuse.
It’s a diaeresis. It looks exactly like an umlaut, but it’s older. It is used to indicate that two adjoining vowels should be pronounced separately instead of as a digraph (for example: Zoë).
Like the (perhaps mythical) American pilot-in-training, who nearly failed his training in England - he couldn’t find “Gloster” on the map, not realizing he should have been looking for Gloucester.
Which is correctly pronounced as “sess-sill,” of course, especially when saying Ceciltucky. We usually just say “see-sill” but we’ll say anything to sell a shirt in Walmart.
Nitpick: the diacritical mark is always a diaeresis. The thing it marks in German (and related language) words is the sound shift termed the “umlaujt.” I think how it picked up that name is that a diaeresis marking an umlaut came to be known as an “umlaut mark” – and you can figure out the rest from there.
I used to work for Arthur Arundel (a descendent), and his family pronounces it “AARONdell.” Too bad there’s no governing authority to get the county residents to pronounce it differently.
You made my day.