Not too long ago, I met one of the Cuyahoga County commissioners. He used both different pronunciations of the word; ki-a-HOG-a taking the lead. I hear ki-a-HOAG-a the most in conversation. There’s also koy-a-HO-guh, not too commonly used but heard in studio version the REM song Cuyahoga. The live version of the song uses kuy-a-HOAG-a.
There’s also the British pronunciation, KA-ho-ger.
Many residents of Cheektowaga, New York pronounce the town’s name chick-uh-tuh-WAH-guh. Then again, the vast majority of the town’s residents are Polish, whcih brings us full circle to the first post in this thread.
The issue of [pronunciation comes up all the time at seminars where you’re introducing a foreign scientist. As one professor put it “Do you pronounce is name correctly, but then nobody knows who you’re talking about, or do you pronounce his name the way everyone does, and risk insulting him (or letting him think you’re ignorant)?”
That Polish “ehw” sound (the “l” with the slash through it) gets changed to “l” all the time. Throughout his papacy, John Paul II practically never had his name properly rendered on American TV or radio. It had one of those letters in it. So it was “Voy-tee-wa” (Wojtyla)
And Wojo from “Barney Miller”? Wojohowicz isn’t “Wo-joe-hoe-wts”, but “Vo-yo-HAW-Vitch”
My last name is pronounced, usually, “Kuh . . . serv . . . kvk . . . suh . . . um, Mr., um, Mr. Kuv . . . sirk . . . um, siv . . . um, Sir?” --so I’ve started using my mom’s maiden name, Darbo. Much easier. (And cooler; I found out recently that Greta Garbo’s mentor was accused by an ancestor of mine, an opera singer, of borrowing the name.)
Back when it was still unusual for large cities to hire New Yorkers as police chiefs, Birmingham, Alabama, boasted one Arthur Deutcsh. That’s right, pronounced Doych, but ending in -csh instead of -sch. He said it had been mangled going through immigration and left that way.
