It is properly said as wodens day, It is named after WODEN.THORs' father. (thursday).
Where's your anglo- saxon blood brother. (pardon spelling).
try wor- chester- shire. see how ya go.In Sacramento there is a street called “Don Julio”. People are equally like to say “Julio” as “Hulio”. Goethe park, though is always “Gate-ee”.
We have a town nearby here called “Aptos”. For some reason, we call it “Ap-toss” instead of the more natural “Ap-tose”. We also have Soquel (So-kell) Drive and Branciforte (Brance-i-fort-ee) Drive. It’s always fun to see what kinds of bizarre mispronounciations the tourists come up with.
I pronounce the “d”. Kind of.
We(du)nsday - the “(du)” being a sort of stop formed by the tip of the tongue on the roof of the mouth.
By the way, the number of people mentioning Worcestershire sauce on this thread leads me to wonder - is it the hot new condiment in the States, or something? It seems to be mighty famous!
(Mmmm… macaroni cheese with Lea & Perrins…)
My personal favourite is ‘Goethe St’ in Chicago, of course pronounced ‘Go-thee’.
Also, Cairo, IL, pronounced Kay-row.
Slightly off-topic, I couldn’t believe it when I heard a Brit say ‘penchant’ as PAWN-Chaw. What?
Daph
But the odd thing is that the pronunciation shifted to wenz-day, as if the first d wasn’t there.
Hunh? What’s wrong with that? Have you been pronouncing it to rhyme with “trenchant” all these years?
(For those that haven’t got IPA fonts, that’s… well… pawnshawn.
Whether “wooster-shire” is wrong depends how you look at it: all -shire suffices around here get pronounced ‘shuh’ or ‘sher’ AFAIK, so you could say that’s how you spell it.
And pah! In my day my surname had a silent “mainwaring”!
Oddly enough, that demonstrates the general rule: you pronounce a name the way the person prefers.
And as long as he signs his name “Luxury Yacht” on documents, it’s perfectly OK for him to pronounce it “Throatwarbler Mangrove.” There are no regulations about how you choose to pronounce a name (though there could be issues; if you chose to prounce your name in a strange way in court, the judge might consider it contempt – but that’s the judge’s decision, not a general law).
There’s always the example of Walt Tkachuk. When he came up with the Rangers, the team put out the work that it was prounounced “TAY-Chuck.” After a few years in the league, he mentioned to a reporter that it had always been prounced “ka-CHOOOK.” The prounciation was immediately changed.
So, yes, you can insist that your name “S-M-I-T-H” is prounounced “Brown,” as long as you’re signing “Smith” on documents.
I grew up in LA and mangled quasi spanish names are second nature to me.
Then I moved to St. Louis, an area seetled by French and the resettled by Germans. And finally just plain old agro-americans.
The Germans delighted in butchering the french names, then the yokels came along and destroyed the german. Two of my local favorites are
- De Baliviere Street is pronounced duh-BOLL-uh-ver.
- Spoede (probably originally spelled Sp o-with-umlaut de) Road is pronounced SPAY-dee.
That makes me think — I live in Hampshire, pronounced “Hamp-shuh” (or “Hamp-sherr” if you’re a country bumpkin). Is New Hampshire pronounced more as it’s spelt?
I don’t know how it’s pronounced in situ, but we Pennsylvanians call it “New Hampsher”.
What’s obnoxious is that the Australians don’t have the same quirks as the British. There’s a town in Tasmania called Launceston. I got there all ready to pronounce it as “Lawnston” (I’m an American, but familiar with Worchester and Leicester and suchlike) because they’re Aussies, they came from the Brits, right?
Wrong. It’s “Lawn-ces-ton.” You pronounce all the syllables, like you’d think. Lucky I heard its name spoken by a native before I opened my fool mouth.
Not that the Aussies don’t have their own quirks. Torquay Beach? That’s “Torkee,” to you.
It’s actually pronounced “duh QUE luh”. You’re absolutely right about new on-air personalities, though. It’s a dead giveaway.
[sub]Doc, one of the few remaining natives who grew up not far from DuhQUEluh.[/sub]
That’s easy. “Fish”
Pretty much right, except that the “z” really is a “ż” in the original Polish, making the name “Krzyżewski.” The “ż” is pronounced as a soft “zh.” (When Polish people say this name, it sounds perhaps closer to an “sh” than a “zh” in my opinion.)
Also, that “rz” sound (which should be a “zh”) becomes unvoiced (i.e. “sh”) because the consonant immediately preceding it is unvoiced. It would be impossible to go from a voiced to unvoiced sound without an intervening vowel.
That’s the same reason why your “ew” (normally an “EV” sound) becomes an “EF” sound.
Hence, in Enlglish the Polish pronunciation would be: “Kshih-ZHEF-ski” or “Kshih-SHEF-ski”.
In New Hampshire, they have an accent that tends to broaden vowels and drop or smooth over R’s. So a local might read his or her car’s license plate slogan (Live Free Or Die) as follows:
“New Hampshah: Live Free uh Dau-ee”
One can almost understand how it descended from the British accent. Ohio, Indiana, et al are famous for coming up with “localized” pronunciations for city names taken from famous European cities.
And on the “Cuyahoga” front, sure Michael Stipe (from Georgia!) pronounces it as written. But Chrissy Hynde, a native Ohioan, pronounces it “cuh-HO-ga” in her song about Cleveland.
One of Heinlein’s characters (I believe it was Jacob Solomon) described a person who, in order to comply with the terms of his grandfather’s will and inherit, had to change his name to “Zautinski”. He did so, but pronounced it “Smith”.
This is, of course, fiction, but, as far as I know, doing so would be perfectly legal in the US, as long as it is not done with intent to defraud.
Isn’t “Cuyahoga” the sound the old Model T horns used to make?
And I’d like an answer to the age-old question:
If “Worcester” is pronounced “Wooster”, why isn’t ‘Dorcester’ pronounced ‘Dooster’?
I once worked in an office with an Army officer whose name was spelled B-E-A-V-I-S, but he pronounced it ‘Bouvier’.
When I was in Tassie I was told it was “Lon-sess-ton”, not “Lawn-”. It’s really weird visiting Tasmania as a Brit - most of the names have been lifted wholesale from the southwest of England: Launceston, the Tamar River, Devonport and so on. They even do Devonshire cream teas 
As for Torquay, that’s not really a quirk, as “quay” is always spelt as “key”. (Torquay is also a town in England, BTW. We also have Newquay. New Quay, on the other hand, is in Wales.)