You say Nevada, and I say Nevada

You may have heard about it by now, but one of the network news anchors -- not Katie Couric, a talented second generation journalist who anchors on CBS, but one of those miscreants on a good for nothing Brand X network -- had the temerity to pronounce "Nevada" as if it rhymed with "Prada" and got inundated with one or two complaints from people with time on their hands in Nevada, a desolate place, mostly unsurveyed, which actually pronounces its name to rhyme with "data." Unless, of course, you pronounce data with a "day". It's a funny thing, but I find that readers, listeners and viewers can be very forgiving about serious mistakes, but mega-persnickety about stuff like this. Of course the reason is, it's not the same readers, listeners and viewers. Different people are motivated to break radio silence by different issues. Helpful, kind people want to help; others like to scold. The persnicks are correct, however: the correct pronunciation is precisely what they say. The "ah" version of a Nevada is a regionalism, and the state itself isn't in that region. Regional pronunciations can be muy tricky. The Arkansas River is pronounced like Arkansas in Arkansas but is pronounced like Arkansas in Kansas. (It flows through both states.) Missouri is a special case. Many Missourians turn the trailing "i" into "uh," and in my youth I tried to emulate that, but most people who say it that way will still tell you that the "correct" pronunciation is "ee". New Madrid, Mo., and the infamous New Madrid earthquake fault are pronounced "MAD-rid," nothing like the capital of Spain. A much misunderstood case is the Appalachians, the eastern U.S. mountain range. In the South it's pronounced with "latch" in the middle, and Southerners love to insist that this is the only correct way to say it. But the prevailing pronunciation from Maryland north is "laysh," and when Aaron Copland composed Appalachian Spring that is how he said it. Which is correct? It depends on where you are. Sometimes pronunciations change. The Washington, D.C., suburb of Vienna was pronounced with "vie" at the beginning when I was a kid, but as more people moved into the area from elsewhere, it gradually came into conformity with the capital of Austria (or rather, the capital of Austria as pronounced by the British, since the Viennese say something else and even spell it differently, "Wien.")  Moscow, Idaho, has not always been pronounced the same as Moscow, Russia (which the Russians spell "Moskva" when they're using our alphabet, but let that pass) and Montivideo, Md., has "video" at the end instead of "vih-DAY-oh," as is the case in Uruguay. The British have different pronunciations and spellings from Americans, though we do not always realize it. During the Falklands War between Britain and Argentina, the mostly British reporters covering the conflict referred to the Argentine government, pronouncing "Argentine" with the tine of a fork at the end. In American English it would be said "teen" or even changed to Argentinian, but for a couple years after the war over the Malvinas (what Argentinians call the Falklands) it seemed everyone tried to say it the British way. This is part of the American love of British accents and British sentence construction, never mind the fact that the British have a long history of bungling the pronunciation of almost everything, even their own words ("Featherstonehaugh" is pronounced "Fanshaw," to give one infamous example.) Linguistic civilians like to believe there is one right way to pronounce every word, but often this is not true, and even dictionaries can disagree. If I mispronounce something I am happy to hear from you, but we can profitably keep the conversation light, I suspect. P.S. Ryan Ozawa says this brings up the pronunciation of Honolulu now. So I guess I'll weigh in one that. I think we should try to pronounce Hawaiian words properly as much as possible, though very common non-standard pronunciations are so common everywhere in the world that we can afford to be gentle about correcting people. I also think there is, and perhaps ought to be, a double standard. I had an auntie who lived in Moiliili who pronounced it "Moi-Lilly," because that was once common. I would never have dared correct her, but it doesn't mean I should say it that way. Even Hawaiian words can be tricky. I live on Ena Road and some very respectable Hawaiian language experts say it should be said like "Enna." However, to my mind this is not correct. John Ena's family name was Hawaiianized from "Ing." I pronounce it "Eena." I say the problem is not that it is mispronounced, but that it is misspelled. But that is a very, very unusual case where I actually understand the background of a word. On most words I need all the help I can get (including the ones in English).

Comments

[Ryan]

Which brings us 'round again to "Honolulu" (versus "Ha-na-lulu")...

[Bob Carroll]

Very few who have lived for a significant time west of Kansas ever had a problem pronouncing Nevada correctly: neh-VA-duh ("A" as in cat)

This is mostly east coast arrogance and southern ignorance. The east coast media is proud that they can pronounce Kazakhstan but won't take 20 seconds to learn how to properly pronounce Nevada, Colorado, and Oregon.

IMO, the country bumpkin who pronounces Illinois as "Illi-noise" is no worse than the equivalent east coast or Texas "educated" media bumpkin who mispronounces Nevada.

In fact, I give the country bumpkin a bit more credit because once informed of his error, unlike some east coast folks I have encountered, he is unlikely to have the chutzpah to tell a native Nevadan or Coloradan how they "should" pronounce their own states.

[Gil Avineri]

Well, I happen to think that chutzpah can be a good thing. So I'm going to add that the word 'NEVADA' is in fact a member of the spanish (ESPANOL) language. It means 'covered in snow'. Hence, the Sierra Nevada mountain range on California's eastern edge literally means snow covered range. And NEVADA in its own language happens to be pronounced with a DADA like the old Swiss artistic cultural movement. So there. How's that for chutzpah. By the way, how many of y'all know what language THAT word comes from? Hebrew. And it 's pronounces with an emphasis on the PAH, not the CHUTZ. We could go on and on, eh?

[Bob Carroll]

My dear Gil,

No American state uses the Spanish pronunciation of its name - California, Texas, Nevada, Colorado, Montana, Florida, New Mexico - Spanish origin but Anglicized pronunciation.

Nice try but totally irrelevant.