Things you were shockingly old when you learned

Constantinople?

now picturing bewitched reboot cast with s. asian dr. mumbai character, or did they actually do this already.

i learned it as part of my job at the time, not sure how i would have found out otherwise
you know they don't say Calcutta anymore too right?

Kolkata

that one only changed in 2001, though

No one in France got the memo. It's still Bombay, Pékin, Calcutta. I think the assumption is that most foreign place names are 'wrong' anyway, so why bother.

that's very french of them

Indeed it is.

you should hear how we pronounce “orleans.”

Or, God forbid, Des Moines.

Black holes are named after the Black Hole of Calcutta Kolkata!

Madras is now Chennai, Bangalore is now Bengaluru, there's lots of others too, not just British colonial names being changed. This is an interesting piece on the Hindu nationalist motivations behind some of it I posted in the South Asia news thread: https://scroll.in/article/902177/no-hindi-hindu-hindustan-implemented-fully-bjps-hindutva-renaming-will-wipe-out-a-lot-of-india

Chennai was the one I was most shockingly old to learn about. Cricket is useful for this sort of thing.

wow -- i remember learning that in 1997! i was at my job processing visas for other people's overseas travel and i learned that Bombay is called Mumbai by a disgruntled customer.

The name was only changed in 1995 so you did OK.

Oh wait, I think that was your point.

Or, God forbid, Des Moines.

― pomenitul, Wednesday, September 18, 2019 10:39 AM (twenty-three minutes ago)

this one hit a little close to home

Had an argument with the wife once about whether it is in fact correct to pronounce Notre Dame the university differently from Notre Dame the cathedral.

I'm at a point where whatever people from hood x or y say is correct as far as I'm concerned. I struggled for years before embracing the French pronunciation of 'tupperware', though:

https://forvo.com/word/tupperware/#fr

(leyana's, that is.)

Also, I still vaguely cringe when I hear Spider-Man pronounced 'speeder-man'.

John Fahey a similarly juicy example

I have no idea how you pronounce John Fahey's name. Is this about to become a thing I was shockingly old when I learned it?

Sund4ar, what side of the argument were you on?

there are a ton of midwestern towns that have messed up pronunciations and eventually you just have to roll with it

Nevada (nuh-VAY-duh) and Madrid (mad-rid) come to mind

Locals pronounce Prescott AZ as "Press-kit". Guy fixing my computer was adamant it should be "Press-cot" because that's how the guy it was named for pronounced his name. Pick your battles man! Just made him sound like a pompous tool.

Is someone about to blow my mind by suggesting that 'Fahey' and a popular brand of Greek yogurt are homonyms, is that what's about to happen

As a general rule, no speaker of English should ever defer to the way Americans insist on pronouncing words. It's just bad form.

I can't deal with Coeur D'Alene being pronounced "Cortle Lane" but I do it anyway

I draw the line at Louisville's preferred pronunciation as being "Lowvull" I will call it "Lew-i-ville" so the rest of the world doesn't look at me like an insane person

It's the same name; I can pronounce them the same. She was probably right. xp to mh

Residents of Windsor, ON, even ones who can speak French, are bizarre with the many French names in the city: "Pierre St" is pronounced "peery" even though no Windsorite would pronounce Pierre Trudeau's first name that way. The common surname "Dupuis" = "doopy"; "Ouellette Ave" = "oh-let", etc.

Shit like 'maudlin' for 'Magdalen' in Oxford comes across as a snobbish shibboleth. Maybe I'm being uncharitable.

Cache le Poudre River is my local fave, you could get almost anything even locally. Usually just “Pooder River.”

My pretentious father had a predilection toward pronouncing certain European city names with exaggerated local pronuciation-- Paree, Praha, Veen, Köln. I started reciprocating by going all-in when talking about Göteborg and Linköping and Firenze and he eventually got the hint and stopped doing it.

road names are fun. Fleur Drive -> floo-er drive

I draw the line at pronouncing Milan - the football club - as Mee-lan because Milan is an English word, the club having been founded by Englishmen who used the English name for Milano.

Likewise I'm not pronouncing Racing Club, Rah-seeng Cloob, or PSG as Pay-Ess-Zhay.

I spent way too much time putting together this video of Alex Trebek saying the word "genre," so now you have to RT it. Sorry, I don't make the rules pic.twitter.com/VacI730SJv

— Alex Jacob (@whoisalexjacob) September 13, 2019

omg

He's a native French speaker tbf.

I had no idea. Or that he was even Canadian, for that matter. Thread strikes again.

Fahey is pronounced with a short a and a properly aspirated h by the Irish (willing to defer here ofc) and British but is a kind of slurred Fay-hee (h almost gone) the way he said it

The differences between FAY-hee and FAY-ee are so minimal. A close friend’s last name is Taheny (Sligo stock) and he’s fine with TAHN-ee tho most of us make the effort to respirate a TAH-hen-ee for the boy

That horizontal comes from horizon. Wtf @ me.

actual giggle at that one

yet they still call the popular snack Bombay Mix.

they don't tbf

afaict Kolkata sounds close enough to Calcutta that people have just carried on saying Calcutta.

sorry, sorry, wait up

Black holes are named after the Black Hole of Calcutta Kolkata!

whaaaaat

Okay, I might walk that back, the line in Wikipedia is

"According to Hong-Yee Chiu, a long-time astrophysicist at NASA, the Black Hole of Calcutta was the inspiration for the term black hole referring to regions of space-time resulting from the gravitational collapse of very heavy stars. He recalled hearing physicist Robert Dicke in the early 1960s compare such gravitationally collapsed objects to the infamous prison.

But the link is to an article titled "50 years later, it’s hard to say who named black holes" (which isn't there any more).

xp fgti - yeah it's mostly about the a, which dictates how you say the h

xpost, I think the black hole thing might be right. I just asked my spouse (astronomer who used to do most research on black holes) who coined it/why and he said Wheeler, because light doesn't escape blah blah. But we just looked up a bunch of things and he agrees that the above is good enough.

Awesome, thank you!

that 'romeo and juliet' by dire straits is about west side story lol

Penguin meat has just enough vitamin C in it to stave off scurvy

jesus man what kind of a bender are u on exactly

The differences between FAY-hee and FAY-ee are so minimal. A close friend’s last name is Taheny (Sligo stock) and he’s fine with TAHN-ee tho most of us make the effort to respirate a TAH-hen-ee for the boy

― fgti (flamboyant goon tie included), Wednesday, 18 September 2019 18:32 (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

fahey/fahy over here is pronounced fa-hee. there is no fay sound, and in general if the name is irish origin the american predilection to -ay would in fact similarly safely be held to be -ah round these parts

Oh like fah-hee? Interesting! Once a year I fall into Irish vs. English naming conventions and I'm always surprised by something every time. Today it was that Darragh is not the Irish spelling but the Anglicized version of... Dara. Usually I'm scratching my chin over Muircheartach or whatever. I learned basic Gaelic pronunciation in my early 20s but not well-enough to process Irish stuff