A couple of place names that have recently crossed my path:
1) I enjoyed the 1952 movie Macao and followed the action as best I could on a map I happen to have (there were a pleasing number of geographical references, including shots of street signs); a scene set at the A-Ma Temple led me to look it up and discover it is “one of the oldest in Macau and thought to be the settlement’s namesake,” and sure enough, the Etymology section of the Wikipedia Macau article says:
The first known written record of the name Macau, rendered as A Ma Gang (亞/阿-媽/馬-港), is found in a letter dated 20 November 1555. The local inhabitants believed that the sea goddess Matsu (alternatively called A-Ma) had blessed and protected the harbour and referred to the waters around A-Ma Temple by her name. When Portuguese explorers first arrived in the area and asked for the place name, the locals thought they were asking about the temple and told them it was Ma Kok (媽閣). The earliest Portuguese spelling for this was Amaquão. Multiple variations were used until Amacão / Amacao and Macão / Macao became common during the 17th century.
It has a whiff of folk etymology (people love those “the locals told them” stories), but it could certainly be true.
2) Ian Frazier’s latest New Yorker piece (archived) mentions Prudhoe Bay, and it occurred to me to wonder how that name is pronounced — I mentally said it /ˈprʌd-hoʊ/ (PRUD-ho) but had no confidence in that. So I went to Wikipedia and to my horror saw /ˈpruːdoʊ/ (PROO-doh). To get a second opinion I went to my old standby, Merriam Webster’s Geographical Dictionary, and sure enough it said the same thing. But above it was the name of the Northumberland town that (via Algernon Percy, Lord Prudhoe) gave the place in Alaska its name, and that had the pronunciation /ˈprʌd-(h)oʊ/ (PRUD-(h)o). Having learned distrust, I turned to the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names and found the same thing — but Wikipedia has /ˈprʌdə/ (PRUD-ə)! And I don’t know whether the change from /ˈprʌd-/ to /ˈpruːd-/ happened because of Algernon or Alaskans. It’s enough to drive a man to drink.
The Prudhoe that lies upon the railway line from Hexham to Newcastle rhymes with “udder” and “rudder”.
@Gavin, seconded. I have friends there, have visited a few times. Wikip’s /ˈprʌdə/ (PRUD-ə) is closest. PROO- anything is ridiculous.
If you’re driven to drink, the Newkie Brown there used to be very fine. But I see the brewery is no longer local. (And John Smith’s Tadcaster own beer is rubbish. Better is Tadcaster’s Samuel Smith. Tadcaster, like Burton-on-Trent has had a long series of breweries.)
My thanks to both of you, and I will correct my erroneous printed sources!
James W. Phillips, Alaska-Yukon Place Names (U. Wash., 1973):
AA is Arctic Alaska.
UH is as in “cup, again, tough”, OO as in “boot, suit, roof”, OH as in “sew”.
LPD:
CEPD simply lists the various pronunciation without any attempt at geographical differentiation.
Since oil exploration began in the North Slope region, there has been a tendency to corrupt the original English and long-standing Alaskan pronunciation to PROO-doh.
Ah, so the PROO- is not even echt Alaskan — I’ll go back to my original version.
Echt Alaskans pronounce the -h-, however, unlike the folks from across the seven seas.