Quote:
Originally Posted by jcp123
I quit playing the pronunciation game a while ago. Weird for me as being bilingual, I always kinda stressed pronunciation.
But I got tired of it. Palestine, TX is apparently Palace-TEEN. Uh? Of course Cairo, IL is a famous one. Irondequoit, NY is anglicized in its pronunciation. I just don’t want to play the games.
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It's one of those things that time spent living in a place tends to take care of by its own.
When I attended the U of I, almost every out of state student there pronounced Moscow with the cow, but by the end of the school year, none of them did.
Local/regional pronunciation isn't limited to just place names. For the first 20+ years of my life, I wore chaps daily, cowboying on the family ranch.
We and every other cowboy I knew always called them 'shaps', with a soft sh sound.
"Chaps" were always English fellows, not leather leggings, and we always laughed when a greenhorn used the hard ch sound.
That's still the way the word is pronounced throughout the west in working ranches. Only dudes say it differently.
But increasingly, the dudes are paying the bills for the privilege of coming to play cowboy for a few weeks of family vacation, so their mis-pronunciation isn't the big deal it once was.
Things change, and so do words.
The long chaps were still the most popular when I was young, but increasingly over the years, the real cowboys don't wear them any more. They prefer the shorter knee-length chaps that are called 'chinks' (with no racial slur connected to the word.) Dudes know nothing at all about them.
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