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veteran
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veteran
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Taunton MA
and then there's Staunton VA, pronounced Stanton.
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Joined: Nov 2000
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veteran
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veteran
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In reply to:
mispronouncing the name of a town
I have to take issue with your use of mispronouncing. You, a stranger, may think the name of a place should be pronounced a certain way; but I submit that the way it's pronounced by the folks who live there is ipso facto the "correct" pronunciation.
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old hand
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old hand
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And doesn't it drive you nuts when actors who are playing Boston characters call it Woo-ster?
There's a city in Ohio actually called Wooster. It's near Akron. I would suspect that it was named from the pronunciation of Worchester.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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>I have to take issue with your use of mispronouncing. You, a stranger, may think the name of a place should be pronounced a certain way; but I submit that the way it's pronounced by the folks who live there is ipso facto the "correct" pronunciation.
Said the man from Ball-mur.
TEd
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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Another town that bemuses is Taunton -- near New Bedford, Massachusetts -- which locals pronounce TAN'n with the n sort of half-swallowed !
I'm thinking of doing some proper research into this. It will mean, several years of travelling/traveling around with a microphone. All I need is some research funding or to persuade the taxman that all my travels are tax deductable.
I think that if I interviewed a real denizen of Taunton in Sommerset they would say Tauu-n. With an elongated first vowel, a common feature of the dialect of the South West. I was wondering if "TAN'n" has a long or a short "a"? If it is a long "a" then it is not so different.
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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>I have to take issue with your use of mispronouncing. You, a stranger, may think the name of a place should be pronounced a certain way; but I submit that the way it's pronounced by the folks who live there is ipso facto the "correct" pronunciation. I agree that the way the locals say the word is the "correct" way. In some cases, as I have mentioned before, there are a few different "correct" local versions. In fact, finding these obscure local variations is part of the fun of travelling. I think it is different in the UK where the names tend to be older and have evolved over along time without an obvious reference point. The ones I find really strange are the ones like Cairo http://wordsmith.org/board/showthreaded.pl?Cat=&Board=words&Number=12538 which you mentioned in the cultural arrogance thread and I believe was mentioned in one of Bill Bryson's books. I find it interesting that such a well known (and really quite easy to pronounce) place name got changed. I suppose that in the days before mass communication, it didn't really matter how the rest of the world pronounced a word, it just mattered that you said it the same way as your parents and your teacher.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Y'all who responded to Chickie's post ought to give it a re-read: This is one that gets me while traveling also...mispronouncing the name of a town. ... I betcha the subject of "mispronouncing" is my, not their.
Anyway, down here in Joe-ja we have a couple of gems that immediately spring to mind:
Albany = Al-BEN-ny
Vienna = VY-en-na
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Georgia and Dangling ParticiplesBoy, the Klan has moved on, hasn't it? The major difference between Zild and Strine, and one that appears to be obvious only to Aunty Podeans and her offspring, is the Zild swallowing of vowels that the Striners actually lengthen. So when in the Land of Oz, I and most of my country-things stand out simply because of the way we pronounce some names. The two that spring to mind are Brisbane - which Zild has as "br's-bin" and Strine has as "breez-bayne" (a little exaggerated in both casses) and Sydney, which Zild pronounces "S'd-ny" and Strine has as "Seed-knee" - again, exaggerated a bit. For all that we understand each other except when it comes to Aboriginal and Maori place names. 
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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I was wondering if "TAN'n" has a long or a short "a"? If it is a long "a" then it is not so different. A sort of semi-long a. OK?  wow
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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>A sort of semi-long a. I think the only way for me to get over this problem is to fly over immediately, all this second hand stuff is just not good enough. I have to hear the a's  .
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