Who changed the pronunciation of Niger?

[John_DiFool]

@dstarfire

You can’t have a discussion of french pronunciation without this illuminating joke: “The name is we ZELL!!”

Clouseau: Tell me do you have a reum?
Hotel Clerk: I do not know what a ‘reum’ is.
Clouseau: Zimmer.
Hotel Clerk: Ah, a ‘room’.
Clouseau: That is what I have been saying, you idiot. Reum. Zimmer.

[igor_frankensteen]

Amusing how politicized place-name pronunciations have become. First time I noticed this ongoing silliness, was back during the Iran Contra mess, in the Reagan administration, when people on the right started complaining that Dan Rather said “Neekayrogewah,” in an attempt to say Nicaragua like the Spanish speaker. Since it was pretty clear Rather wasn’t on Reagan’s “side,” they decided that failure to substitute Americanized pronunciations of all place names, was an act of treachery.

I’ve seen other people since, who get upset about the same thing, because they think someone is purposely trying to put them down for using American pronunciations.

[Siam_Sam]

@carnivorousplant

Paris, Arkansas uses the English Pronunciation.

All I know about Paris, Texas is no one would dare call it Gay Paree.

[DPRK]

Maybe the Texan city was named after the Trojan bloke…

[Siam_Sam]

The condom maker? That’s a possibility.

[Punoqllads]

@DPRK

Maybe the Texan city was named after the Trojan bloke…

Lesurting in a plegnency.

[jtur88]

I think a great deal stems from timid publishers afraid they will be boycotted by people who have an interest in the Plurinational State of Bolivia and the Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia if they don’t comply with those countries’ silly demands for usage of those full names, but nobody in the United Mexican States or the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan have never made a fuss. Nor the people of Jungguo or Misr or Bharat. And then all that Cote d’Ivolre foolishness.

• It’s not Macedonia’s fault, but Greece’s

[Gyrate]

Since this zombie is shambling along nicely anyway…

@Really_Not_All_That_Bright

In the US, the original pronunciation of coupe had died out before the 1950s. It’s still current in the UK though.

The British still spell it “coupé”, though, with an accent on the e.

Which ruins one of my favorite stupid jokes (which needs to be spoken aloud):

Q. Why does a chicken coop have two doors?
A. Because if it had four doors, it’d be a chicken sedan.

@Acsenray

The same reason we say “Belarus” instead of “White Ruthenia,” “Moldova” instead of “Moldavia” (or “Bessarabia”), “Thailand” instead of “Siam,” “Iran” instead of “Persia,” and “Myanmar” instead of “Burma.”

Why’d they change it? I can’t say - people just liked it better that way.

[Lord_Feldon]

And yet we still have Georgia, which would actually be easier to talk about if we found some native name to call it.

[BigT]

Since that limerick has been brought up again, does that mean people actually previously pronounced Niger to rhyme with tiger?

What I learned in school was the “soft” g, /dʒ/ or J sound.

On an aside, now that I’ve used the IPA, are there any French words that are dge, dgi, or dj that have the English J sound?

[DPRK]

Are you thinking of Djibouti ?

[Hector_St_Clare]

@BigT

Since that limerick has been brought up again, does that mean people actually previously pronounced Niger to rhyme with tiger?

What I learned in school was the “soft” g, /dʒ/ or J sound.

On an aside, now that I’ve used the IPA, are there any French words that are dge, dgi, or dj that have the English J sound?

All French words (usually loanwords of foreign origin) with the English “J” sound are spelled with “DJ”. Except some West African loanwords and names where it may be spelled “DI”.

[pulykamell]

@BigT

Since that limerick has been brought up again, does that mean people actually previously pronounced Niger to rhyme with tiger?

I’ve been looking on Google books through historical dictionaries/pronunciation guides back into the 1800s, and the few examples I’ve found all have the “soft g” (/dʒ/) pronunciation given.