Some pernickety people pronounce it as YOU-ranous, which of course then sounds like “urinous”, which could be a source of confusion.
Where do people in the US pronounce it like that? I pronounce it as EUR-uh-nul (IPA: ˈyʊər ə nl), and have never heard it pronounced differently.
Some guidance from someone who actually knows something about Greek would help, but for the God at least, wouldn’t the stress fall on the final syllable?
ETA I suppose you would get the first syllable stress after latinizing it (Ouranos -> Uranus)
The fact that dictionaries are descriptive rather than proscriptive means that they should, in fact, indicate how people do actually speak, and so in principle they should be a good place to find this out.
But this ideal is difficult to realise in practice for two reasons. First, most languages, and certainly British English, accommodate a wide variety of regional and/or class accents. A dictionary of manageable size can only go so far in documenting these. Most plump for a particular accent which is generally seen as somewhat normative and focus on documenting that. But of course designating any particular regional or class accent as normative is itself a controversial exercise.
Secondly, as you point out, dictionaries can only capture pronunciation at a point in time, whereas pronunciation is always shifting. So what the OED records as the dominant pronunciation may have been the dominant pronunciation when the entry was written or last edited, but it may not be today.
Still, if we are looking for information about pronunciation which is more than purely anecdotal, the OED and similar resources are pretty much all we have. And they do attempt to be systematic.
I know - because you have told me - that you assign the same sound to the first syllable in Europe and to youth. But I don’t know whether this is the vowel sound from *cure *or the vowel sound from *goose *(or something else). Or are these also the same vowel sound for you?
For me, *Europe *goes with *cure *and *youth *goes with goose, as the OED indicates. Which is ironic, since I’m not even British.
I agree. The OED approach dates from an era when, for class and other reasons, a signficant number of people in Britain - well, in England, anyway - were prepared to accept that a particular accent was normative, even though it wasn’t the accent they themselves had. That time has passed.