Si Amigo was referring to Russia, OH, which is just down the street from Ver-sales. The normal pronunciation of that town by the locals is “Roo-sha”. I’m sure most of them call the big country where Moscow is “Ruh-sha”.
That general area of the state seems overrun with “mispronounced” place names. Add Bellefontaine (bel-FOUN-tin) to the list. But it’s certainly not limited to that region. Across the state you’ll find the town of Rio Grande, which has the cringe-inducing pronunciation of “Rye-o Grand”.
All over the U.S. you’ll find place names based on European cities or countries which have Americanized pronunciations. I was objecting to Si Amigo implying that that was more common in Ohio (or in some part of Ohio) than elsewhere in the U.S. I was also objecting to the implication that anyone who pronounces the name of their town in some Americanized way must be too stupid to realize that the inhabitants of the foreign city pronounce it differently. But thanks for the correction about what he meant by Russia.
The stupidity is that someone apparently liked the way certain towns in Europe were spelled and took the spellings but made no attempt to make the pronunciations close. As if handwaving the pronunciation somehow divorces the word from its origin.
This would be like having a child, knowing the French name Pierre (pronounced pee-air), deciding it looks cool, giving your child that name, but pronouncing it “pyre”. For what purpose? You like the sound “pyre” then name him Pyre.
Language is changing constantly. The people who originally chose the European names for their frontier towns likely did have an idea of how they were pronounced in their original languages. But things change according to the circumstances.
Are we all ignorant douchebags because we don’t speak English like this –
Yea, I always want to call him “boner” or “beaner” because it’s one letter or one umlaut off from the German equivalent for “beaner” (Bohner- which is pronounced like “boner”). But the “oe” makes me pronounce it in the correct German- “Beurner”.
I am so pleased with myself to still (been 30 years since I’ve played this game) be able to piss people off over teasing them over the way they pronounce my old hometown neighbors (like Ver-sales and Roo-sha). It’s a game all of the locals learned as kids (from their teachers no less); teasing your neighbors. It starts out as “Those people over there are such hicks they can’t even pronounce the name of thier town properly!”.
But I do play both sides of the game; when relatives from other parts of the country would visit we would defend Roo-sha and it’s pronunciation from the world. Being the proud Ohioian hicks that we were.
People who live in Cairo, IL call their town KAY-RO. But do they call the city in Egypt KAY-RO or KIE-RO? If they call the Egyptian city KAY-RO as well then you could chalk it up to language/accent drift. But I doubt they do. This is more of a willful pronunciation change done “to be different”. The goofy “I like the spelling but I’ll change the sound” mindset. I’m being charitable by calling it goofy.
There’s so much ignorance to fight, I don’t know where to start.
Do you use two spaces after a period just “to be different” even though the standard has been one space for decades now? Shall I be charitable by calling it goofy?
> People who live in Cairo, IL call their town KAY-RO. But do they call the city in
> Egypt KAY-RO or KIE-RO?
Remember that nearly all of the American towns which have names of places elsewhere in the world with anglicized pronunciations were so named in the nineteenth century. Nobody was regularly hearing the names mentioned on TV or radio or in the movies. I suspect that what happened was that someone in the mid-nineteenth century decided that it would be nice to name their town after this foreign city that he’d read about. The residents of the town took their best shot at the pronunciation. Decades later someone told them that that wasn’t how the people in that foreign city pronounced the name. They said, "Well, that’s fine, and that’s how we’ll pronounce the name of that city. We like the way we pronounce our own town name though, and that’s how we’re going to keep on pronouncing it.
Of course anyone in Cairo with even a tiny amount of education will call the city in Eqypt Kie-ro, and the same is true for the other similar towns. Claiming that because they don’t pronounce the name of their town like the foreign city they don’t know how it’s pronounced would be like claiming that because I (and any close relation to me) pronounce my last name Wag-ner instead of (approximately) Vog-nair, we don’t know that it’s pronounced Vog-nair by German speakers. Of course we know that, and we talk about the composer Rick-hard Vog-nair. It’s pronounced Wag-ner among nearly all Americans with that name and Vog-nair among all German speakers. All of us Wagners with at least a tiny amount of education know that.
I believe Wendell’s theory is probably correct. Still, I find it hard to imagine taking the name of something without ever hearing it pronounced. But I wasn’t alive back then so WTF do I know. Carry on.
Okay, so curiousity got the better of me and I checked into acsenray’s claim that the double-space gap was a relic. Surprisingly, there’s some merit to acsenray’s statement. Still, do a googling on this subject and you’ll find it’s a veritable holy war, quite reminiscent of the proscriptivist/descriptivist conflict.
So a language has to grow. Certainly new words are needed. However I would feel much more comfortable if English had an authoritative board much like many other languages seem to have. The fact that enough people can buck the system enough to make changes for changes sake, rather than out of a need or a sense of moral correctness, disturbs me.
They’re both language issues and the reasoning is analogous. You learned something one way, but most people do it a different way. That doesn’t make your way the result of some kind of mental defect or anti-social tendencies.
> However I would feel much more comfortable if English had an authoritative
> board much like many other languages seem to have.
In general those “authoritative boards” (actually, the only one I know of is for French) have little effect on the amount of change in the language. People go on speaking and writing any way that they feel like.
That’s all from an American English to German translation perspective… but that’s because the American pronunciation sounds like “Beaner” and the German for “Bean” is “Bohne”. But really, in German, “ein Bohner” is a “floor polisher”. But conceivably, it could also be “beaner”.
