Except of course in Saskatchewan where the town of Torquay is pronounced Tor-kway. And the town of Ceylon is pronounced CEE-lawn.
Oddly, the pronounciation of Montmartre is actually pretty close to the French pronounciation.
And for anyone who’s not from here, Saskatchewan would be pronounced Se-SKATCH-ewe-wan, not Sask-AT-chew-WAN. Really.
I think the Gratiot thing is splitting hairs, but with this, there can be no dispute! 
It’s Lang-K’stir. I’m a Carrollian, m’self…
That’s funny - I spent my first 14 years on this earth living in Snellville - first in a duplex on Pine Road while they were building “my” first house on Eastwood Drive. As soon as the city approved the K-mart on Wisteria - which basically put K-Mart’s loading dock a hundred yards from our backyard - the folks moved over to Duluth. After bouncing around Atlanta for a few years - Buckhead, Dunwoody, Alpharetta - I moved to Charlotte to be with the love of my life. And now I run in to someone on the SDMB who’s from that little town “where everybody’s somebody”. :rolleyes:
I stand by my pronounciation. It looks like we pronounce it the same way, but you did a much better job with the phoentic spelling.
Merriam-Webster agrees:
:eek: I am devastated. Absolutely, utterly devastated.
Again, dictionaries are guides to popular usage, not the arbiters of what a word is.
It’s pronounced Lank-aster in PA too (according to roomates from the area), and Lan-caster in NY.
Yep. I live in LANK-a-stir, PA. However, if you go more than about 50 miles in any direction from Penn Square, the pronunciation becomes LAN-caster. We can always tell when an announcer on the radio or tv is from outside the area when they have to say the name of the city…
jayjay: You were close. It’s “Coal-bren.” Almost a “brn” sound that took me months to learn. People still laugh at me at the general store.
We have a Miami, Oklahoma. But of course we can’t call it My-AM-ee, we call it My-Am-uh :smack:
The one immutable rule of Celtic languages, from what I’ve noticed, is that if you eliminate half of the letters in any given word and pronounce what’s left you’ll be close.
Brisbane in Australia is pronounced “Bris-bin” (very short i’s, almost non-existent) IIRC. Brisbane, California is pronounced “Briz-bane”.
Had a friend in college whose last name is Sczupaj. Most people would choke out something like “Skuh-zoo-padge”, it’s actually pronounced “Shoe-pie”.
Got another friend whose middle name is the “peace symbol”. That’s his actual middle name but look at any form that gets entered into a computer and it usually shows up as an “O”.
Miamuh is also the traditional pronunciation in the Dayton, Ohio, area (the “Great Miami Valley”). Don Wayne, who was the anchorman for Channel 7 for many years said it that way every day. But you don’t hear it much anymore, since he retired in the early 1980s. These days I would only expect a real old timer out in the country to say Miamuh.
Near Chillicothe, Ohio, there’s a school district and high school called “Unioto,” because it incorporates parts of Union Township and Scioto Township. Uni-Oto, get it? But nobody in that area says “Unioto,” they all say “UnioNoto,” sticking an extra “N” in there.
OK, so Milan pronounced the same way as Italians pronounce the soccer team from Milano, and Medina pronounced as in Spanish… 
I have problems talking with people from Toledo, OH. The way they say it, I’d write Tolido.
Loved that Will Smith song where they’d say “welcome to Mayami” in English and “bienvenido a Miami” in Spanish 
I remind people of that song whenever we’re speaking Spanish and they say Mayami. It’s Miami in Seminole, too (I had a 'nole classmate at UofMiami).
My first lastname’s structure is “commonlastname de town” (de means from, in these lastnames); this is quite common in Navarra, Álava and Burgos, but very uncommon everywhere else. It leads to a lot of confusion: people who think the part behind “de” is Mr Nava’s lastname (no such person), people who thing “de town” is my maternal lastname, etc. I used to feel kind of guilty and wonder if I was being snobbish for insisting that people use the whole thing, until a classmate with the Commonlastname got called by my whole thing and blew off her top. I feel perfectly fine to be upholding 10 centuries of family tradition, now.
My understanding is that the name “Miami” has nothing to do with the Seminoles or anything to do with Florida at all. They named the city after the Miamis of Ohio.
I’m Welsh but my name is as common as muck, impossible to get wrong.
This on the other hand is a Welsh village name.
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
Usually abbreviated to Llanfair P G.
It is the venerable home of Iceland_Blue(yay,waves flag for home town)
We are near the River Teign(teen)
On it you will find Teignmouth(tinmouth),Teignbridge(teenbridge),
Kingsteignton(kings-tayn-ton) and Bishopsteignton(bishops-taing-ton)
Four different pronunciations of the same damn word within a few miles of each other…
Here’s an Anglicism I’ve wondered about:
Is Marquis of Queensbury really pronounced “Mar-kwis of Kweens-bree”?
I used to live near a town in Alabama that had two names. Half of the town was Guin(pronounced Gu-Win), while the other half was spelled Gu-Win and pronounced Gwen. I never understood this.
I suspect that pronunciation is correct because it’s a Native American name (as are a great many “funny” town names in Georgia).
About 12 years ago I made my first trip to GA (other than passing through the airport in Atlanta). My destination was Dahlonega. When I got nearby, I asked another patron in a restaurant for some local information, and got the most polite pronunciation correction I’ve ever received.
I said Dah lon EGG ah. She said, “I believe they say it, Dah LON aga.”
Lovely little antebellum-type town, with a zillion souvenir stores on the town square. It’s the place where gold was first found (by whites) in North America, which was the reason why the state of Georgia pushed so hard for my ancestors to be disposessed.