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by DeathArrow 58 days ago
>Now it depends who has good spoken british english.

My favorites are David Attenborough and BBC in general.

1 comments

The BBC actually has an official "Pronunciation Unit", which tells people like newsreaders the "proper" way to pronounce words and placenames. Unfortunately, particularly in the latter case they often get it wrong. For example, my late Dad was born in a small West Yorkshire town called Sowerby Bridge, which the unit insists should be said Sourbee Bridge. Everyone, without exception, who lives there knows it is Sorebee Bridge. Writing in to the BBC complaining about this and many other similar errors is a popular hobby.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Pronunciation_Unit

Local pronunciations of place names are often different from what's expected, and whether intended to be such or not, are often used as shibboleths to distinguish locals from outsiders. The examples of Couch Street (/ˈkutʃ/) in Portland, Oregon and Tchoupitoulas Street (/ˌtʃɑp.ə.ˈtuː.ləs/) in New Orleans, Louisiana come to mind in American place names.
Tchoup is just unpronounceable to most outsiders; the shibboleths are the streets that are pronounced very differently from what it would be anywhere else. Like Calliope (rhymes with TALLY-hope) or Burgundy (emphasis on second syllable).
Or Chartres ("Charters") or Melpomene (/ˈmɛl.pə.ˌmiːn/), I get it. My wife has corrected me on quite possibly each and every one of the streets with a locally specific pronunciation.

Ooh, thought of another good place name like that: Quincy (/ˈkwɪn.zi/), Massachusetts! Massachusetts has a fair number of those, owing to its English settlement heritage.

I wasn't referring to place names that sound like dirty words (as Couch St. sounds like "Cooch"); an uncountable number of Gropecunt Lanes in England would certainly qualify. I was rather referring to place names with counterintuitive pronunciations locals are expected to know, so that outsiders are immediately clocked by pronouncing it wrong. Couch St. definitely qualifies in both categories though.
In this LLM age, I guess that would be Gas Town :-(

https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...

Lancaster PA (LANG-KISS-TER) checking in
Oh, we have a TON of placenames in Michigan that are pronounced much differently than they are spelled. A lot of these are just Native American and French names/words that most people don't know how to pronounce anyway, but a few are just special for no apparent reason.

Examples:

Orion = "or-ee-un", Ionia = "eye-ON-nee-ah", Charlotte = "shar-lot", Milan = "MILE-an", Saline = "suh-LEEN"