I live in the Chicago area, where everyone knows who Casimir Pulaski is. We have a street named after him, and many public schools have a day off in his memory. And we all know how to say his name: pull-ass-key.
In Indiana, there’s an entire county called Pulaski, but they pronounce it “pull-ass-sky.”
Then again, try asking a Chicagoan to get you to “paw-lee-nah” street, and they’ll laugh at you, because everyone knows that Paulina is pronounced “paw-LINE-ah.”
There’s a lot of French place names near where I live, so the pronunciations often get botched by the anglophones in the area. For example, Port Mouton (poor mou-tuhn*) is pronounced ‘port ma-toon’.
One which drives my mother crazy…Port L’Hebert. Should be pronounced ‘poor luh-bear*’. Nope, Port Le Herbert.
*If anyone wants to try and correct these feel free, I’m not good at explaining pronunciations
Some Ontario street names with unexpected pronunciations…
Annes Street in Whitby: pronounced “Ann-ess”. Interestingly, I think it was orriginally “Anne’s” (the posessive), but somewhere along the way the apostrophe fell off the street signs.
Weber Street in Kitchener-Waterloo: pronounced “Wee-burr”, not “Web-burr”.
Kerr Street in Oakville: pronounced “Kurr”, not “Kairr”.
Eglinton Avenue in Toronto. This one has a longer story. Originally it was pronounced and spelt “Eglington”. However, sonetime in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, it came to be pronounced “Eglinton”, and the street signs were changed to match. Now, I notice that just about everyone pronounces it “Eglington” again. Wonder when the signs will get changed back…
Off the subject, but a geographic oddity about Georgia is that it has many cities that have the same name as one of its counties, but the city is never IN the county with which it shares a name (e.g. Quitman, Cuthbert, Baldwin, Perry, etc., are never located in Quitman, Cuthbert, Baldwin and Perry counties, which like as not are in different corners of the state.)
When I was little I lived for a year in LaFayette, AL, which is pronounced "lah- FAY’- it (emphasis on second syllable and last syllable almost absent).
There is a large village in upstate New York named Pulaski, pronounced much like they do in Indiana: puh-LASS-kigh (that last syllable is “sky” without the S). And in the Great Valley of Virginia is the city of Pulaski, pronounced, p’yew-LASS-key, with a very strong palatalization in the first syllable. I’m not sure how New Jerseyites reference the Pulaski Skyway.
Then there are the various Norfolks, which I never can never keep straight. Some are NOR-f’k, some are NOR-foke, some NOR-folk, some NOR-fauk, and about 150 miles north of Pulaski, NY, is the one commonly referenced as NOR-fork.
44 miles from the Virginia border on I-95 in North Carolina is the city of Rocky Mount, but only natives and folks from Maine ever say its name correctly; the second word is MAOUNT.
Without IPA characters I won’t even try to represent how Chaumont, France, is uttered, but Chaumont, NY, is shuh-MOE. Southeast of it is Lowville, which would rhyme with cow-ville, and which is near the rural hamlet of New Bremen, which sounds like a LOTR ethnic distinction: the Shire-folk vs. the Bree-men.
North Carolina also has Conetoe, which is almost (but not quite) the final syllables of Wapakoneta.