Ha! And I thought that was one piece of aristocratic trivia I knew.
It’s a place’s name vice a person’s, but there were rumblings a couple years ago over the pronunciation of ‘Nevada’. IIRC red states favored the short ‘a’, blue states the long.
Just a little note about John Wayne, he was married three times, one of Spanish American decent and the other two were from Latin America. So he had some help and first hand knowledge of the language.
I’ve never heard anyone ever pronounce Nevada with a long-a sound. “Ne-vay-dah?” “Ne-vah-day?” huh?
My bad.
Red state pronunciation: a as in hat.
Blue state pronunciation: a as in yacht.
In most of the countries I’ve lived in, my surname is pronounced the way it was in The Blue Max, and not by American teens circa 1960…
As I said in an earlier post.
In Mildred Pierce (1945), Joan Crawford asks her ex-husband (I’m pretty sure) “How are your OR-an-ge groves?” rolling the “R” in a very hoity-toity fashion.
Speaking of The Shat and final Ts, when Shatner was on SNL playing TJ Hooker, and he jumped on a car hood and didn’t get off until Wisconsin, he said he was in Beloit, but he pronounced it as if it were a French word (Buh LOY) and not like it really is (Buh LOIT). We pronunciate all our letters in WI, thankyouverymuch.
Probably not the last one. Ask Steve Martin
To be fair, this is not phonemic in American English and most monoglot Anglophones can’t distinguish clearly between k and kh.
A UW professor told our class the the correct pronunciation would be “Bell-wah.”
No offense, but we’d all grown up being told it was pronounced to rhyme with the sound of a fart in the bathtub.
Is that because it is a French derivation?
Detroit came from a French phrase meaning “the straits”, pronounced “de-twah”.
When I was growing up, my teachers told me to pronounce it “de-TROIT”.
But even then, “DEE-troit” was taking over.
I’m calling it “Ne-VAY-DAY” from now on just to annoy everyone.
In “RED DUST”, set in Indochina, Clark pronounces it “SAY-gon”. Any idea if this was standard, pre-war?
Dan