Seeking guidance on a just-encountered pronunciation curiosity. It involves the town of Leadville, Colorado – some 70 / 80 miles south-west of Denver. I’m in the UK: though I’ve long been aware of the town’s existence (it has significance in connection with a topic of particular interest to me), I’ve never heard the name spoken before today.
I’d always taken it for granted that – with Leadville having been in its time an important mining centre – it must be pronounced with the first syllable rhyming – like the mineral – with “red”. However, I’ve just listened to a talk on U-Tube, involving several mentions of the town, with its being pronounced with first syllable to rhyme with “heed”. This talk was rather strangely enunciated: with somewhat robotic-seeming diction, and in what sounded much more like a British, than an American, accent – which causes me to wonder a little, whether everything in the talk is altogether “kosher”. Would be grateful for informed opinion here, as to what is the standard pronunciation of this town’s name; or are there partisans of both the “Led…” and “Leed…” versions?
I’ve never heard anything but the short e name rhyming with the metal. It was indeed named for the lead mineral deposits, which initially hampered gold mining operations, but which were found to have a high silver content:
Here is the local pronunciation I am familiar with, it does sound like the metal when my family say it; and they have lived in Chaffee County just to the South for 4 generations now.
Now consider the local way of saying “Buena Vista” and the above pronunciation of “Chaffee County” may have lead to some hypercorrection by non-locals?
Based on your description of the voice–“somewhat robotic-seeming diction”–the video you saw may have been produced using a text-to-voice speech synthesizer. There are a lot of YouTube videos that use this for their audio, rather than having an actual person record them.
These sorts of speech synthesizers are pretty good these days, but they often have trouble with heteronyms–words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently–like lead (the metal) and lead (to guide).
In my experience, the town is pronounced like the metal.
The town in South Dakota named Lead is indeed pronounced LEED. It’s useful to know it is next to Deadwod, and was home to the large Homsestake gold mine. The town is named for the leads or lodes of gold, not the other metal spelled lead (led). I assume Leadville Colorado is similar.
Leadville hosts annual 100-mile races for runners and cyclists. I’m a lifelong cyclist and many of my friends have raced the Leadville 100; no one in my peer group ever pronounces the first syllable to rhyme with “feed.” Doing so would instantly expose the speaker as someone unfamiliar with the race.
Yep. I fully agree that this is the most likely explanation. Speech synthesizers are so good that I sometimes can’t tell right away whether the narration is read by a human or not. The heteronym thing is nearly always a giveaway.
I was just about to post something on this but was ninja’d. The Colorado town is named after the metal, the South Dakota town is named after the “leads” or lodes of other valuable metals including gold, and the names are pronounced differently.
It is possible the narrator of the video in the OP was aware of the pronunciation of the South Dakota town, and assumed the Colorado town would have been pronounced similarly.
Thanks, everyone. Glad that I don’t have to make the adjustment of henceforth thinking of the place, as “Leed-ville” !
I had, oddly, not only heard of Lead, South Dakota; but was aware of its “Leed” pronunciation – “seen spelt out” somewhere, not heard. My acquaintance with these places such as it us, comes from my being a railfan, and having read about sundry US locations of rail interest – as were both the South Dakota, and the Colorado, communities. Leadville I had hitherto come across no indication of, pronunciation-wise – had just automatically thought “lead, the mineral”.
I meant YouTube – I’m an elderly dinosaur and very clueless computer-user: I do a lot of botching of this stuff, one way and another !
Enola Straight writes: “The Buena Vista in New Jersey is pronounced the same way”.
It’s pretty well-known, I think, that America has a lot of, shall we say, idiosyncratic pronouncings of place-names from the Old World – Cairo, Illinois, pronounced “Cay-ro”; and isn’t there a Versailles somewhere, pronounced “Vur-sales”? It’s hard to quarrel with the Chamber of Commerce lady in the video – the inhabitants of the town should be able and free to pronounce it the way they want !
Off-at-tangets-going here; but I have fond memories of the strip-cartoon series in a British kids’ comic in the 1950s, called The Hillies and the Billies, about two feuding hillbilly families (they were perpetually discharging ordnance at each other, but no-one ever got seriously hurt). The local town in this series, was called Deadville: which I see as having overtones of a dozy, unexciting back-of-beyond place; and also, a “hybrid” of Leadville, and Deadwood – which latter was known of in '50s Britain, because of its stagecoach. (Otherwise, this Hillies… series seemed to be set, appropriately, in the Appalachians.)
There seems to have been a bit of a “thing” in that era, of humorous strip-cartoon series in childrens’ comics, with affectionate mock-American settings, often amusingly not got quite right. I recall a very long-running one such in another comic, about the exploits of the formidable and mountainously-built tough guy Desperate Dan. Dan’s home town was Cactusville; which from the context, was very definitely in the American South-West. In the cartoons, though, Cactusville looked remarkably like a northern British industrial town of the period; only with cacti all over the place. All nice wholesome fun…
Off-topic, but the OP mentionerd him, so here’s Desparate Dan in his other home town of Dundee (where the comic was printed for decades). He, and his comic companions, are now heritage figures!
Cactusville was definitely in Texas and Desperate Dan’s favourite meal was cow pie, made by his Aunt Aggie. This was a giant meat pie with real longhorn cow horns sticking out of the crust.
The idea of feudin’ hillbillies was well known to British kids from the highly popular TV series from the early 60s; The Beverly Hillbillies
Texas, yes? I definitely thought Arizona or New Mexico, but will admit that I don’t know quite why. I seem to recall that when an extra-special feast was called for, the dish was duly labelled “Cows (plural) Pie”, with two sets of longhorns sticking out…
I remember The Hillies and the Billies in their comic, from the mid-1950s: I think, before the Beverly crowd had ever been heard of – in Britain anyway.
