My wife and I are reading Wallace Stegner’s novel Angle of Repose at night and enjoying it greatly; at the point we’ve reached, the narrator’s grandmother (whose story he’s telling) has joined her husband at the remote and brutal town of Leadville, Colorado, in 1879, and there is a mention of the nearby Sawatch Range. Naturally, I wanted to know how “Sawatch” was pronounced, so I googled and found that Wikipedia article, which said /səˈwætʃ/. That sounded a little implausible, so I thought I’d check the reference, which was “Merkl, Dameon (February 26, 2013), “What’s in a Colorado name pronunciation?”, The Denver Post” (archived version). I was glad I looked, because that piece is a treasure trove of unexpected pronunciations and has an amazingly descriptive point of view; some excerpts:
In a diversely populated state where place names stem from English, Spanish, French and American Indian origins, it’s hardly surprising that certain geographical pronunciations vary as much as the languages from which they sprang. But which pronunciations are correct? According to the University of Colorado’s Department of Linguistics chair, professor Andrew Cowell, there are two answers to that question.
“If you’re an academic purist, you might want to say that the pronunciation in the original language is correct. But in reality, I think most people realize that if you move to a new state or a new city, and you start saying something the wrong way, people start looking at you funny, and you eventually say it the way everybody else says it, right?”
Take Louisville, for example. “In Colorado, we say ‘lū ĭs vĭl’ for that town near Boulder,” says Cowell. “But if you go to Kentucky, they say ‘lū ē vĭl.’ If you try to say ‘lū ĭs vĭl’ in ‘lū ē vĭl,’ you’re going to get corrected every single time. So I think the existing local usage is really what has to be considered the correct pronunciation.” […]
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