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In Alabama :
Library--> (slowly now)--> Lie- buh- rare- ree.


- -


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How do you lot pronounce library, btw? ... ducking for cover

From Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe (the Fairy Queen, followed by the Lord Chancellor):

Oh! Chancellor unwary
It's highly necessary
Your tongue to teach / Respectful speech--
Your attitude to vary!
Your badinage so airy,
Your manner arbitrary,
Are out of place / When face to face
With an influential Fairy.

A plague on this vagary,
I'm in a nice quandary!
Of hasty tone /With dames unknown
I ought to be more chary;
It seems that she's a fairy
From Andersen's library,
And I took her for / The proprietor
Of a Ladies' Seminary!


[ducking for cover -e]


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Children here go to LIE-berries;
grownups go to LIE-bragh-reez.

Children and grownups here berry objects in the sand. If they buried berries in the sand, it would be a berry berrial.

If the berry berrial occured the day following today, it would occur too-MAW-roe.

Berry regards,
WW


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bury

Interestingly enough, there is a newscaster named Chris Bury who fills in for Ted Koppel on Nightline, and is Koppel's heir apparant should he ever leave. And Chris Bury pronounces his name bure-ee as in jury. I guess the family changed the pronunciation to avoid the negative connotation. However, name entymology is usually pretty dead-on (unless the spelling's been changed, or they've been Anglicized or Americanized)...so, a millenium or so ago, when they were first attaching names, the first Bury was prolly a gravedigger...and originally pronounced that way.

(and if you were famed for intimidating the enemy by the menacing way you found of shaking your speare at them in the charge, well......good thing Will's forebears weren't known for dropping their speares, eh? Dropspeare would be such a bummer...but then, once it attained the same legendary status praps Dropspeare would bear the same respectful resonance after all?..it's the work, not the name, right?)


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good thing Will's forebears weren't known for dropping their speares, eh? Dropspeare would be such a bummer

Had they been Dropspeare's, Will likely would not have been around to experience the displeasure of carrying around such a name.


#71819 05/31/02 12:23 AM
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Had they been Dropspeare's, Will likely would not have been around to experience the displeasure of carrying around such a name.

Good point, Jazzo! Uh, spearepoint that is!




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If you mean that pronunciation of family names is a reliable guide to how the word was pronounced, I would want to check that with all the Deaths and Deadmans around here first.

Pronounced, on the most part, as Deeths and Deedmans, no doubt? Wonder what one had to be up to in antiquity to be dubbed with such a monicker? And why would one allow such a name to stick?

   "You're a deadman!"

   "Cool! I kinda like that name! You can keep calling me that if you like...
uh, instead of killin' me."





#71822 05/31/02 12:48 AM
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I just asked my husband, a non native English speaker, and he pronounces it the burr-ee way, I do berry. His library is without the first r. The word makes perfect sense to him because the verb lie is,to lend, in German.
The pronunciation of Nevada as Nevahda bugs me.

foggy gardens


foggy gardens
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