This is inspired by an episode of Entourage: Why is Rodeo drive pronounced differently depending on where the street starts and ends? According to one of the characters in the series, she was living in the ghetto part of BH and said that it’s not pronounced “ro-day-o” when it’s to the south (I think it was to the south anyways) of some street, but rather “ro-DE-o” (the normal pronunciation in case you missed my phonetical spelling).
Why?
In English “ROAD-day-oh,” accent on the third-to-last syllable. English style.
In SPanish “Roh-Dai-oh,” accent on the next-to-last, unless an accept tells you elsewise.
roe-Dee-o is the english pronounciation
roh-deh-oh is the spanish.
I guess using the spanish pronounciation makes people look smarter and better educated.
To clarify: ROH dee oh and roh DAY oh, respectively.
I would say ROE-dee-o instead of ROH-dee-oh but I guess that’s a potayto-potahto issue
and roh-DEH-oh instead of roh-DAY-oh as there is no “hey” sound as is hey, or may or day. It is more of an eh as in exceptional or elephant.
but yes, point taken on the stress.
I’ve never heard ro-DEE-oh in Enlgish. It’s always RO-dee-oh. And if you want to get nitpicky… in Spanish it would be more like ro-THEY-oh than ro-DAY-oh, with the r trilled slightly as it normally is for “r” in Spanish.
not trying to be nitpicky. I just get a real kick of trying to write foreign languages in hack phonetics. 
And I strongly disagree with your they/day suggestion. D is definitely D in spanish never TH not in any spanish “dialect” I know.
And, yes the R is RRRRRR. with gusto!
What’s the difference here? I think most native English speakers would pronounce those two exactly the same.
But D in Spanish is somewhere between the D sound and the TH sound in English. At least, in my experience, most native Spanish speakers say the D sound with their tongue between their teeth, not against the roof of the mouth.
ROE as in toe. ROH as in rolling (maybe?, I am having a hard time finding a word that I haven’t heard with both sounds). In spanish, my native tongue, it would be the difference betwen “roudiou” and “rodeo”.
And the D in english sounds a bit like an R for us, so you are right in that it would be somewhere in between D and TH. But without the “airy” sound of the TH.
Allow me to hijack this thread and save me a thread I was about to start:
When I try to tell an english speaker how to pronounce the vowels in spanish, my suggestion is:
AH EH EE OH OO
I never quite got the AY (for the E) sound that is most commonly offered and that leads to a very *gringo * pronounciation. Where does that come from?
“ROE de oh” for me; always has been. The only times I’ve heard “Ro DAY oh” are for the LA street and (sometimes) the Aaron Copeland work.
“Copland,” that is.
The letter D in Spanish has 2 pronunciations that depend on where it’s found in a word or whether it follows certain letters. The name David is a good example. The two D are pronounced differently.
I’ve never seen the show of which you speak, but Rodeo Drive is (as far as know) always pronounced ro-DAY-oh. At least I’ve never heard it pronounced any other way and would think a person very odd if they seriously pronounced it RO-dee-oh.
true, if there is no vowel after it, that’s a different sound (one simply ommitted by many!)
The “d” in Spanish is often pronounced more like a voiced “th” in English, depending on what sounds precede it. This is something that would be taugh in the first week of Spanish 101. Es la verthath. 
estas themente
And how are you distinguishing roe/roh and o/oh? In general American English, they’re identical.
Okay. The entertainment event in the English-speaking American West (and now, more and more, in parts of the East as well) involving men demonstrating their abilities to control horses, bulls, etc., is a ROAD-ee-oh. This is the standard English-language usage for the term, and Copland’s composition bears that name as well.
The Spanish word from which it is derived puts the accent on the middle syllable, gives the vowel E the continental sound of é, and uses a voiced dentopalatal fricative rather than the voiced dentopalatal stop/plosive of English for the sound represented by D. It would be pronounced roe-THEY-oh, but with the voiced TH sound further front than in English “they,” almost where the tongue rests for an English D. Not that there are not Spanish dialects which use the stop D in lieu of the fricative.
Regarding continental E – I think it’s worth noting that “we’re all Fonzies on this bus” as far as the sound goes – English “long A” corresponding to /e/ in most continental languages is a long-drawn-out “A-a-a-a-a-ay!” much like Arthur Fonzarelli’s signature greeting. In contrast, the sound in most Continental languages, including Spanish, is of the same timbre but short and clipped. English long A is really a diphthong, /ej/ in phonetic symbols; the same sound in Continental languages is briefer and with no trailing ee or Y sound. It is not however the eh sound of “bet” but, to come up with the closest English parallel, imagine a very rapidly spoken command: “Wait!”
Jack Webb, in an episode of “Dragnet” (1960s version) prounounce the cowboy event as “ro-DAY-oh.” That’s the only time I’ver ever heard it pronounced that way.