Brian

Not surprising, my friends would get rather huffy with me when I'd point out that 'r' is actually an 'l' on the Welcome to sign outside of town.

I came up with two explanations:
1) The good people of Norfolk really had it in for the letter 'l', or
2) The pronunciation was a hold-over from when the town was officially North Fork, as in the North Fork of the Elkhorn River (which is physically where the town is situated).

After decades of careful consideration, I've decided to go with #1.

Brian

The UK one is pronounced Nor-fork or Nor-f@k depending on how rhotic the speaker is; I suspect that's the cause of the above. :-)

S.

The one in Virginia, near Virginia Beach, has local variations including "Norfuck," "Orruh," "Nork" and a couple of others.

I am also reminded of the city name Newark. For the one in New Jersey, it's basically one syllable (sounds like "Nork"). For the one Delaware -- an immediately adjacent state -- it's not just two syllables; the two syllables are pronounced with such emphasis on distinction that it sounds like two words ("New Ark").

Unless your flight has been diverted/delayed there. Then it's pronounced "FUCKing Newark", with very heavy emphasis on the first syllable.

--G.
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Depends on how far away from it you live. More than ten or so miles, and it starts being pronounced "Noork" (long U sound, like in "new").

-- Bob,
whose parents grew up in Irvington, right next to NoorkNewark.
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

And if you lived in south Jersey (south of Philly), as I did, it's "New-erk".

>-------------------
>My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of
>personal spite.

Jeanne

	Jeanne Hedge http://www.jhedge.com
"Never give up, never surrender!"

No. I refuse to believe that anyone pronounces it "norfatk".

Speaking of which, there's a visiting student from the north of England in one of my classes at UMaine this semester. She's great. Has that full-dress Professor Brian Cox accent, the kind where words like "thing" have a distinctly audible second syllable. I keep wanting to try and engineer a situation in class discussion where she'll have to say "geyser" so I can find out if she pronounces it "geezer". I bet she does. :)

--G.
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I believe Senji meant /ˈnɔrfək/.

Here's an LA Times article on how even the locals don't know how to pronounce "Los Feliz".

My favorite part: "Griffith Observatory museum guide Angelica Ruiz, however, pronounces Los Feliz in Spanish. (She anglicizes it when talking about Los Feliz Boulevard, though, and isn't sure why.)" The anglicized version sounds like "Loss Feel-us", btw.

As long as they don't say "los feyLEETH", people can pronounce it any way they like. I'm not havin' any of that "Tharagotha" nonsense in my personal universe. :)

(Interesting article, though. I never realized there was a pronunciation crisis in southern California; I've always assumed the Spanish pronunciations were in force for the most part. Heck, even Jack Webb on Dragnet, the gringiest gringo who ever walked the streets of TV LA, said "los feleez", which is as good as you're gonna get from a white 1960s Establishment figure. :)

--G.
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It's not really a crisis; we're all more or less adherents to Postel's Law. Just the number of variations on Los Angeles -- from the full español Los Ángeles to whereever Arlo was going with a couple of keys -- we wouldn't get anything done if we tried to debate that. Other than the outliers, Van Nuys (sounds like "guys") and Sepulveda (originally Sepúlveda), most pronunciations are acceptable.

The only time I've been really surprised was when visiting the coastal redwoods up in "Del Nort" County at the northwest corner of California.

The L.A. Times likes to wring its hands about this sort of thing. I'm a white guy who grew up in a very white suburb of L.A. in the 80s, and I sure never knew anyone who didn't say "los feLEEZ" or similar. Certainly the Mexican-Spanish pronunciations were considered authoritative. I think we were all taking our cues from the traffic reporters on the radio, and they were all firmly in "white guy doing their educated best to pronounce words the way their probably-actually-from-Mexico Spanish instructors taught 'em to" territory.

The Worcester and Leicester in Massachusetts are pronounced the same as the UK town names (i.e. two syllables), allowing for other differences in accents and such.

Well, it doesn't have an H in it, so that's a starting point...

Usually "wooster" (first vowel as in "wool", not "tool"), but there's a local hard core that says "wistah".

Place names are very often problematic, particularly in New England, where many places' official names are based on 18th-century English people's halfassed attempts to transcribe and romanize Algonquian words in the first place, and others (like Worcester) are recycled place names from Britain, where such matters had already been a hopeless muddle for centuries by then :) Throw in 200 years of random dialectic drift and you get Massachusetts (itself a fucked-up Algonquian word) towns like Woburn (woobun) and Framingham (pronounced as if you were setting a roasted pig part up to take the fall for a crime), and places in Maine with names like Meddybemps, Mattamiscontis, Wytopitlock, Nesowadnehunk, Big Ambejackmockamus. Few customer service or shipping people I talk to on the phone ever get Millinocket right on the first try; I hesitate to imagine how they'd fare if the town had received its originally considered "local" name, Nollesemic. :)

It's also worth noting that sometimes people simply can't be bothered. Maine's French place names (and there are a lot of those, we have a long border with Quebec and New/Nouveau Brunswick) are good examples of that. "Maine" itself is a French place name, but it's simple enough that not even Mainers can screw it up. Not so for the border town of Calais, which is pronounced like those hard things you develop on your hands if you do a lot of manual labor. Even the Frenchmen (by which is always meant people of French-Canadian origins, not actual men from France) say it that way.

--G.
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Is Millinocket pronounced differently from how it is spelled? I've been saying "Mill-in-ocket", with the "ocket" as in "rocket." That seems like it would be hard to screw up, it's damn near phonetic.

(Also, Mill-in-Ocket, with the dashes and all, would be a great name for an isolated English village in which there are sinister goings-on.)

-Merc
Keep Rat

That's close; the middle syllable is usually sort of semi-elided, with the vowel stuck on the end of "mill" as a schwa and the "n" attached to the remainder of the word. For some reason customer service people always want to give it either a long O or a French ending, as in cabernet. Or they just go completely off the rails and it becomes some kind of godawful transporter accident*. I don't really know how that happens.

--G.
* And that, children, is why I'm frankly not bothered if there's never a Blu-Ray release of the Director's Edition of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
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Milla-nocket?

Jeanne

	Jeanne Hedge http://www.jhedge.com
"Never give up, never surrender!"

Pretty much, yeah. I don't remember what it's supposed to mean; strangely enough, it does not refer to the fact that there was a paper mill here, as it is a Penobscot word and therefore presumably not referential to 19th-century industrial installations. It's one of those natural-feature place names that means something like "the place where the river forks" or "three big rocks and a bent tree" or "Darmok and Jalaad at Tanagra" or some similar thing.

--G.
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According to Wikipedia, it means "the land of many islands", after all the islands in the Penobscot River. Mind, the town was named in 1901, -after- the Great Northern Paper Company mill was begun, so said translation may be a little suspect.

--- Philip

	Philip J. Moyer Contributing Writer, Editor and Artist (and Moderator) -- Eyrie Productions, Unlimited CEO of MTS, High Poobah Of Artwork, and High Priest Of the Church Of Aerianne -- Magnetic Terrapin Studios "Insert Pithy Comment Here"

Well, yes, that's because the mill was here first. There's no other reason for a town to even be here, which is an awkward fact now that the mill is no more.

--G.
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Speaking of halfassed romanization, I had occasion to refer to the original Okrand Klingon Dictionary the other day, and in the process reviewed the section on the Klingon phoneome.* As I did, I realized something. In Okrand's Klingon language, capital Q represents a sort of hardcore K sound (there being few other kinds of sound than "hardcore" in Klingon), and there's a note in the section about terms of address indicating that when it appears at the beginnings of names, it usually comes out with an R at the end (so that, for instance, Commander Kruge's name is more accurately romanized "Qugh"). It doesn't do that at the end of words, though.

As such, the famous Starfleet captain's name might best be approximated in romanized Klingon as "cheymS QQ".

I find this curiously appropriate considering how much of his career he spent griefing the Klingons.

--G.
"Cry some more, you Klingon bastard."
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You've corrected me on this in the past, you'd think I'd remember.

Brian

In Dallas, Texas, there is La Jolla Street, which runs through a variety of neighborhoods, and has been spelled three separate ways on street signs (La Jolla, La Hoya, and La Joya).

You can also tell someone is relatively new to Texas if they pronounce Montague County like the name of one of the two rival families in "Romeo and Juliet." While the Bard may have intended it to be pronounced "mon-tuh-gyu," every Texan knows that it's "Mon-tayg" County.

Montague County's largest town is another example. Bowie, Texas, is pronounced like Jim Bowie's last name (Boo-ee), having been named after the man. Pronounce it like a certain rock singer's name (Bow-ee), and you're going to get some odd looks from the locals.

You might get odd looks anyway. It is a small town in Texas, after all.

Ebony the Black Dragon

"Life is like an anole. Sometimes it's green. Sometimes it's brown. But it's always a small Caribbean lizard."

Particularly since his name is pronounced with the first syllable as in "take a". :)

--G.
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The worthy himself described it as 'Bow and Arrows, not Bow wow wow' as I recall. :)

...!
Gott's Leetle Feesh in Trousers!

Did he? I thought it was the other way around?

Then again, I also had a five-second stretch just now where I couldn't remember what month it is. March? November? Fuck it, it's snowing when it shouldn't be and the end of the semester is nowhere in sight, that doesn't narrow it down.

--G.
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Note 'as I recall'. The one thing I DO know is that a friend of mine is wrong. He insistst it should be Buoy.
Say what you want of him, he is NOT floating out in the channel going 'ding, ding, ding'.

...!
Gott's Leetle Feesh in Trousers!
At least, I don't THINK he does. But, with the things celebrities get up to, who knows?

Really? I've never heard it pronounced that way. I've always heard it as in "tie a." I admit, though, that I've never actually heard David Bowie say his own name, so every person I've heard say could be wrong.

Ebony the Black Dragon

"Life is like an anole. Sometimes it's green. Sometimes it's brown. But it's always a small Caribbean lizard."

So how is it pronounced? La "haul-a"? La "hoy-a"?

Jeanne

	Jeanne Hedge http://www.jhedge.com
"Never give up, never surrender!"

"Throat-warbler Mangrove".

--G.
Honestly, how did this even take this long to happen in this thread? It's like the Godwin's Law of pronunciation discussions.
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"My name is Denis...I'm going to pronounce it ParFLEU! And you can suck on my peenay!"

...!
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Spelling is your friend

I believe, that it's pronounced like La Jolla, California, is. That is, "La Hoy-a." This being Texas, however, I am sure there is some subset of the populace that tries to pronounce it with a J, like "jolly" or "joy." And thusly, it's possible that they think it's three different streets.

Ebony the Black Dragon

"Life is like an anole. Sometimes it's green. Sometimes it's brown. But it's always a small Caribbean lizard."

Vaguely related: I went to school with a Robert Duquesne and an Elizabeth Duquesne (no relation).

Robert's family pronounced it "Dukain", as in Calleigh Duquesne from CSI. Elizabeth's pronounced it "Du-kez-ne," and would get rather angry if you asked them "Are you sure?" because, well, it's their bloody name, they'd know.

-Merc
Keep Rat

There are a lot of Franco-Canadio-American families here in the Podunk region who pronounce their surnames in sort of the same Frenglish style as "cruSANT" earlier, viz. the Bealieurs ("Bowlyer"), the Potvins (pronounced just like it's spelled, nothing even slightly French-sounding about it), the Roys (ditto), and of course the ones who used to be on the Discovery Channel, the Pelletiers ("pelleteers", which I guess would be like a rocketeer or musketeer except with small, oblong pieces of stuff).

--G.
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Acadians, right? The geography is about right for it, although obviously you'd know your own local lore and terminology better than I.

-Merc
Keep Rat

Many, but by no means all. Most of the Acadians were expelled from what eventually became Maine, as from all the British-controlled territories, after the French and Indian War (which is why there's that Acadian population in Louisiana). Some returned after the American Revolution, particularly in the St. John Valley (which forms the borderland between Maine and New Brunswick), but there are a lot of Quéois bécois too, who filtered in from the western reaches over the years. The Maine-Quebec and Maine-NB borders were until very recently (as in "late 2001" recently) very porous.

How porous, you ask? Porous enough that my paternal grandmother was not aware until a couple of years ago that she had in fact been Canadian the whole time. When the border controls tightened and passports became required to get back into the US again, she and my grandfather applied for same; the State Department came back to her and said, in essence, "What are you asking us for, lady? You were born in Grand Falls, New Brunswick." Amazingly, this did NOT turn into a ten-year odyssey of bureaucratic wrangling with the Social Security Administration et al., none of whom had evidently noticed that interesting fact before the passport people started digging around; instead, even the notoriously tetchy U.S. immigration people appear to have gone, "Oh, what the hell, forget it" and stamped everything. She did have to sign a thing saying she wouldn't support Canada in the event of a war. :)

On the plus side, now I can give my father shit about having been an illegal immigrant's anchor baby.

--G.
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Assuming at least one of your great-grandparents were also American citizens, tho, (which may or may not be true, I obviously would not know) that really shouldn't have made a difference. Your grandmother could have been born on the Moon and she'd still have been American.

>Amazingly, this did NOT turn
>into a ten-year odyssey of bureaucratic wrangling with the Social
>Security Administration et al., none of whom had evidently
>noticed that interesting fact before the passport people started
>digging around; instead, even the notoriously tetchy U.S. immigration
>people appear to have gone, "Oh, what the hell, forget it" and stamped
>everything. She did have to sign a thing saying she wouldn't support
>Canada in the event of a war. :)

This doesn't happen so much to those of us who live in states with great huge bodies of water forming our border with Canada, but I've heard tell it isn't uncommon out west as well, especially since there are places in northern Minnesota where the precise position of the border has only been clarified fairly recently and there was a long tradition of the local authorities regarding that whole "citizenship" thing fairly laconically.

My memory is fuzzy, but I seem to recall the US and Canada agreeing, both formally and informally, to make it as painless as possible for everyone involved to sort things out, as nobody had a real interest in seeing nice white people with no discernible accents being denied social security benefits or being tearfully deported on the evening news.

>On the plus side, now I can give my father shit about having been an
>illegal immigrant's anchor baby.

Oh man, that's always fun. I give my Dad shit about being the son of a lifelong union man and shop steward. He hates it when I remind him of that.

-Merc
Keep Rat

Cajuns tend to hold much closer to French orthography in local pronunciations, in my experience, oddly enough... or, perhaps, not so oddly, if you're aware that there were monolingual Cajun French speakers still around well into the mid-20th century, and there's still a handful of people who speak it as their first language and American English as a later-acquired second language. (IIRC, this is also true, to a lesser degree, among the Creole population around New Orleans.)

EDIT: Also, this whole thing reminds me of the two Beauforts. There's one in North Carolina, which, for some time, I thought was "Buford," because that's how locals pronounce the name. In South Carolina, it's pronounced "Bowfur" or "Bowfurt" (with the first syllable pronounced approximately correctly for French, like "bow-and-arrow", but the second syllable wanders off into the wilds of the Southern US vowel shifts, and whether the "t" is pronounced or omitted -- and when it is pronounced, it's barely such -- may not even be consistent for the same speaker).

Sepulveda Blvd. is pronounce "Seh PULL veh dah", but the British satnav is convinced it's more "S'pul VAY da"

Other streets of Spanish derivation receive similar treatment.

And, since you reminded me--

I lived in Maine for a while, and worked both in the drive-through at McD---- and as a 411 operator.

Given that the breakfast fajitas were fairly popular, I soon grew used to the inevitable New England butchering ("Can I have some fah-JEE-tahs?") of that product.

However, listening to Easterners butcher the names of the following towns burned memories into my brain that, frankly, I could do without:

La Jolla, CA. It's "La Hoya" not...the other thing.

La Cañada Flintridge is "La Can Ya Dah / Flintridge" not the country immediately to the north of Maine.

...actually, anything with the ñ (n-tilde if it doesn't show up) got horribly butchered, now that I think of it....

This works both ways. The other day I was at a Dunkin' Donuts drive-thru and tried to order a croissant. The incomprehension I received was so impenetrable I finally had to go inside and point at the thing I wanted, at which point the larval human employee gave me the sort of look they reserve for old people whom they consider very stupid and/or deliberately being a problem and said with exaggerated understanding, "OH! You want a cruSANT," rhyming with "plant".

As for Spanish place names, when I worked at Leading Edge I would routinely startle callers from the Southwest by pronouncing the names of their streets and towns more or less right when reading them back out of the registered-warranties database. Three years of high school Spanish, you know. Also, "Tujunga Canyon" is just fun to say. TuHUNNNNgaaahhh. Boca RRRRRRATón. RRRRRRRANcho CucaMONgaaaaaaaa.

--G.
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......wut.

......who....how could that even happen? In what accent does "croissant" even...GAH.

You, sir, just hurt my mind.

>
>As for Spanish place names, when I worked at Leading Edge I would
>routinely startle callers from the Southwest by pronouncing the names
>of their streets and towns more or less right when reading them back
>out of the registered-warranties database. Three years of high school
>Spanish, you know. Also, "Tujunga Canyon" is just fun to say.
>TuHUNNNNgaaahhh. Boca RRRRRRATón. RRRRRRRANcho
>CucaMONgaaaaaaaa.
>

Listening to traffic reports is pretty fun around the LA area for that reason--you can tell that some of the reporters actually do have fun with the names.

Also, it's a great way to keep a mental map of the LA freeway system in your head--it may not be The Knowledge, but it's non-trivial and very enabling.

Many years ago (as regular readers may recall), I took a job that required me to move to California, and since I had a while before I needed to report for my first day, I drove out. At the Arizona-California border, there were two things of note: a California Department of Food and Agriculture checkpoint where I was literally asked whether I had any fruit to declare, and a sign encouraging me to tune my car's radio to some AM frequency or another if I desired more information about the state I was entering.

So I did - there's not a lot else to do on I-40 between Needles and Barstow (as in "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold") - and discovered that the station at said frequency, presumably some kind of tourist bureau or Chamber of Commerce thing, was playing a highly romanticized history of California on an endless loop. It was narrated by the late Ricardo Montalbán, who was the kind of man of whom it's said one could listen to him read the phone book - particularly a phone book covering a region with a lot of Spanish names in it. Just the way he said "California" was mildly magical.

--G.
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Heh! Yeah, that's a pretty amusing checkpoint. Deeply srs bzns, of course, given the agricultural community in CA and the relative lack of citrus pests, but still pretty hilarious.

>So I did - there's not a lot else to do on I-40 between Needles and
>Barstow (as in "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the
>desert when the drugs began to take hold") -

Oh, dear me. Barstow. What a HOLE that place is.

So I was on a contract upgrading systems for the Army Corps, along with several other people. Our project manager--fellow by the name of Kendall, who was from Back East somewhere and had never been to California--was very proud of having rented a Prius, and very proud of having brought a satnav system.

He was so very chuffed over this satnav system that he'd engage it for any trip, even those of only 10 minutes' duration.

At this point in time, I did not own a smartphone or satnav, so my navigation was chiefly through these retro things called 'maps' and 'road signs'.

I'd just finished upgrading some systems at Edwards AFB along with one of my fellow contractors, and he'd just finished down at Palmdale--nearby enough, but far enough away that not seeing him on the road en-route to our next destination would not be unusual--and we agreed to meet up in Barstow, so as to go to Ft. Irwin the following morning.

I didn't think anything of it at the time--I popped out the north gate of Edwards, hopped on the freeway, and followed the signs for Barstow, getting there a few hours later in plenty of time to grab dinner at the (very sorry) sizzler in town there.

I did get rather concerned after a few more hours, so about 9 that night, I called up Kendall to ask if he'd gotten to town OK.

"We're almost there," he says, "we just passed Fresno."

Record scratch.

"You ...what?" I said, upon which I learned a few things:

1. There is more than one Barstow in California. The one he was going to was this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barstow,_Fresno_County,_California

2. His satnav differentiated those Barstows by zip code, and ordered them naively.

3. Kendall was a very very funny guy on next to zero sleep. The guy who'd been following him the whole way--also from Back East--not so much.

Given that the University of California at Riverside has the only comprehensive collection of every orange cultivar in the world, I would think that they would need to be mindful of citrus pests. Sort of like not having open matches in the Special Collections department of a major library.

Ebony the Black Dragon

"Life is like an anole. Sometimes it's green. Sometimes it's brown. But it's always a small Caribbean lizard."

Here, one can visit exotic locales like Dundack (Dundalk), and drive along Holntown (Highlandtown) Road, then head down to Warshnin (Washington), then over to Naplis (Annapolis).

While in the area, you may also want to go Downy Oshin (to the beach) and check out the wooder (water).

(Hmm. Is it just me, or does Downy O'Shin sound like a good name for a Bond girl?)

Or, alternately, one could offer the full name, "Balmermund."

I've only been to Baltimore once, on a very short trip; my wife and I drove up there to see Rammstein in concert. (It was either there or Atlanta, which are roughly equal distance from where we live, and neither of us have much urge to drive through rural Georgia.) I will say that the reputation for crab cakes is well-deserved (I got one out of a tiny grocery store deli near the university campus, to eat on the road home, and it was fucking amazing).

I vaguely recall some Sports Broadcasting Personality of the day spending much of Favre's early career willfully pronouncing it "Favré", either to Be Colorful or possibly because he specifically wished to annoy the name's owner. I don't remember who it was, though. Not Keith Olbermann.

(Similarly, Will Smith of tested.com is fond of pronouncing fragile "fragîlé", a habit which reached its apotheosis in one Tested Mailbag segment wherein he announced the receipt of a "fragîlé packáge". :)

--G.
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Reminded of reading somewhere of a guy whose father told him that that was the name of the Italian World Glass Monopoly. They sent glass of all sorts all over the world, every box marked with their company name. Fragile Glass.

...!
Gott's Leetle Feesh in Trousers!

I used to think To Be Announced was a real, albeit weirdly and inconsistently scheduled, TV show.

--G.

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There's also one in Maine. It's the kind of place where you look around and you're glad you don't live there, even if you're from Millinocket. :)

--G.
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I'm not surprised; it's the kind of name that'd be attractive to the kind of person that'd name his kids Ezekiel and Zebediah, and that sort was fairly widespread.

The one in WV's mostly state park; I've considered moving closer than 35 miles away, but the rent is all set by what snowbird 1% types are willing to pay, and way out of the reach of some minimum wage schlub like me.

-----

"V, did you do something foolish?"

"Yes, and it was glorious."

My mother's nomic struggles have been straightforward: telemarketers asking for Jeet, Jetty, Jet, and so forth. However, from an early age, I had endless playground struggles with various bullies, the worst of whom were Star Trek literates who would wrinkle their noses at me and call me Bajoran.

I'm surprised that you didn't run into any who were also tennis-literate and accused you of being a Borg...

-- Bob
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My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

My sincerest apologies in advance, but does that make you...

Bjorn in the USA?

Aaaand, Munin wins an internet.

...!
Gott's Leetle Feesh in Trousers!