I ran across a reference to Bourbonnais, Illinois, and wondered how it was pronounced, so I headed to the Wikipedia article, which said “(/bərbəˈneɪ, bərˈboʊnəs/ bər-bə-NAY ,bər-BOH-nəs).” Huh, thought I. Then I scrolled down and found this discouraging tale:
The original French pronunciation of Bourbonnais came to be Anglicized over time to /bərˈboʊnɪs/ bər-BOH-nis. In 1974, a state representative from Bourbonnais introduced a resolution “correcting” the pronunciation of the town’s name to /bɜːrbəˈneɪ/ bur-bə-NAY, closer to the French. In 1976, for the U.S. Bicentennial, the Village Board passed a resolution making “ber-buh-NAY” the official pronunciation.
Why don’t they go all the way and require a uvular fricative for the r? What the hell is wrong with officials, that they can’t just accept the way people say things? I certainly hope there’s a substantial segment of the town’s population that stubbornly hangs on to the pronunciation of their forebears. I personally will make it a point to say /bərˈboʊnɪs/ should I ever have occasion to talk about the place.
Why don’t they go all the way and require a uvular fricative for the r?
It would be an apical trill, but still…
(J.-M. Carrière, “The Phonology of Missouri French: A Historical Study (Continued)”, The French Review 14(6), 510, 1941).
I think what they call “Parisian” is [ʁ], and the grasseyé is [ʀ].
I recently learned that Condé Nast, for whom the publishing house is named, had a Missouri French mother, whose family were among the founders of St. Louis.
“After a referendum in 1875, the settlement incorporated as the Village of Bourbonnais, with George R. LeTourneau as its first mayor, and trustees Francois Sequin, Joseph Legris, Alexis Gosselin, P.L. Monast, Alex LaMontagne, Joseph Goulet, Jacob Thyfault and Len Bessette.” That’s a pretty remarkable concentration of French-sounding surnames for that part of the Midwest that late in the century, well after fur-trading voyageurs had ceased to be the primary drivers of the local economy.
Bourbonnais is in Kankakee County (two south of Chicago), and I am reminded by free association that in his classic train song “The City of New Orleans” the late Steve Goodman rhymed “Kankakee” with “odyssey,” and it worked just fine.
This paper nicely analyzes how Miami-Illinois teeyaahkiki ‘open country’ got corrupted, in stages, into Kankakee.
That is a nice paper; here’s an excerpt:
Since the Sieur de La Salle was named Rene-Robert Cavelier before he purchased his title, accusing him of acting in a “generally cavalier manner” seems like a semi-learned joke?
Ha! If he didn’t intend it, it’s certainly ben trovato.
And finally, it seems to me, the -n- is a misreading of the handwritten -a-, not a mishearing. But it could be /ak/ assimilating to /ãk/, I suppose.
Luckily no official has ever tried to correct the way Australians say “Mount Kosciuszko.” Let’s not give them ideas.
(I would prefer to leave this comment as a challenge for curious readers, but I’ve just noticed that SOMEONE IS WRONG ON THE INTERNET. I can’t let that stand. It’s actually KOZ-ee-OSS-koh, not KOZ-ee-US-koh as per Wikipedia.)
Wouldn’t stressed OSS and US be pronounced the same in that context, [ʌs], by the (presumably) AmE speaker who wrote that?
Not in my lect. OSS uses AH and US is schwa (ʌ).
Luckily no official has ever tried to correct the way Australians say “Mount Kosciuszko.”
As seen here in 2003.
Ryan: You’re right, now that I think about it. Anyway, from my memory of hearing Mt. Kosciuszko pronounced, the first and third vowels are about the same.
Just adding to the heap of curious place name pronunciations.
Berlin, New Hampshire. BURR lin
Biscay Road in Damariscotta, Maine. BISS key
That one got me into a little trouble when I came to live in a nearby village.
I assumed that it was named for the Bay of Biscay, or Vizcaya as the province
is called in Spain. When I said Biss Kay folks looked at me crosseyed. As I was ‘from away’ they expected me to be wrong about most everything.
Rest assured nobody says Bourbonnay.
In my kayak company days I’m pretty sure I put more people on the Indiana stretch of the Kankakee than anyone since the voyageurs and native Americans. We used a river trip as an excuse for a kayak company to bring people to see the “siege” of 10-25,000 sandhill cranes that gather near the river every fall. It’s pretty spectacular. Maybe more so than the famed Platte River gathering since those couple hundred thousand are spread across 90 miles of river.
As one of my partners would say, the cranes came to see the strange spectacle of a couple hundred humans crammed onto a wooden platform in the wind and cold.
As seen here in 2003.
And referred to later in 2017, in a thread I looked up less than an hour ago while trying to research how Leonhard Euler would (probably) have pronounced his last name.
(It turns out that a StackExchanger in 2021 had ended up with a similar result to the 2008 Wikipedian, though with some uncertainty in the initial vowel: “[*aɪləʁ]~[*ˈeɪləʁ]” (sic, with inconsistent stress signs). Given the Russian transcriptions, I think his name was unlikely to start with [a-], but both [ɛ-] and [e-] seem plausible. I’m not sure how much is actually known about the phonetic history of Basel German that far back.
In any case, it’s certainly neither “Yooler” nor “Oiler”, though it’s probably closer to the latter.)
Rest assured nobody says Bourbonnay.
I am very glad to hear it.
The three speakers in Celebrating 150 Years of Bourbonnais with the Kankakee County Museum say bər-bə-NAY. I didn’t listen to the whole hour so I dunno if they discuss the pronunciation(s).
The 2006 source cited by Wikipedia:
Illinois News Broadcasters Association has bər-BOH-nəs for both the town (actually a Village) and the township.
WP says the town’s population was 18,164 in 2020 and the township’s was 40,137 in 2010.
It’s not clear from the sources who was saying bər-BOH-nəs in 1974. Was it everyone except a few cranks like Beaupre? Or was there significant variation?
I couldn’t find the text of the alleged 1974 resolution. It might be House Resolution 1035 of 17 June 1974, seen on pages 48-50 of the transcript, but I hope not.
When I was writing HS sports for the SunTimes,m in the 80’s all the locals called the high school Bradley BurBOniss. A good friend is from Kankakee (the town) and he laughs about it, with the opposite point of view from Hat’s – “those yokels in BurBOniss”. But local peculiarities get flattened out as places suburbanize and more outsiders move in. Maybe my info is outdated.
Downstate Illinois has plenty of French-sounding toponyms that do not date back to the early era when Francophones had been the first wave of IE-speakers moving through the region and making maps. Some seem like real-estate promoters just thinking that French sounded “classy” for marketing purposes (Belleville); others simply push the mystery back a step, as e.g. Champaign, named for Champaign County, Ohio, with wikipedia not venturing an opinion as to the motivation for giving that bit of Ohio a French-origin name in 1805. Then you have the interesting case of e.g. Du Quoin (in Perry County), named for local historical personality Jean-Baptiste Ducoigne (with variation in reported spellings of the surname), but a) that Ducoigne was no Frenchman but a leader/ruler of the autochthonous Kaskaskia people, who had been subject to a few generations of French/Jesuit influence on their naming practices before the new Anglo-Protestant hegemony had arrived in the region; and b) the name seems to have first been given a few generations later, when the Kaskaskia were no longer a relevant political/military/economic factor in the area (the survivors having probably already been expelled in the general direction of what is now Oklahoma) and thus could be safely romanticized as of purely historical interest.
ETA: and then you have e.g. St. Clair County, where the surname St. Clair is of ultimate French origin, but had been brought by Norman gentry to Scotland six or so centuries earlier and thoroughly domesticated there, such that the only mystery is why the Scottish-born General St. Clair (first governor of the Northwest Territory) didn’t use the more common spelling of Sinclair.
WP also cites Place names of Illinois, but loses the nuance of the original:
Hilariously, that is also the case in the original Polish…
Given its present state, I expect a more or less syllabic [r], laminal like in Russian, and probably [ɛ]. And low pitch on the stressed syllable.
In all of German, [ʀ] may have been used by a few people in Berlin, I guess, apart from a few isolated local phenomena*; [ʁ] was far in the future.
* A long time ago, probably in the foreword of an Österreichisches Wörterbuch far, far away, I read about a small region in remote Upper Austria where [ʀ] developed so early it prevented non-rhoticity from coming in, and Kerzen “candles” is – or was in the 1950s or something – pronounced with something like [ɛx].
It’s actually KOZ-ee-OSS-koh
Every true Midnight Oil fan knows this, although I don’t know how many Midnight Oil fans there are outside Australia these days.
NYC is adorned by the Kosciuszko Bridge, which carries the BQE (alias I-278) over Newtown Creek, which now as in colonial times separates Brooklyn from Queens. If you tune in to local radio/TV news reports of where there are currently traffic jams, you will hear plenty of models of local pronunciation.
As discussed here in 2003.
What happens to foreign toponyms in Argentina like “Hurlingham”, “William C. Morris”, “Temperley”, and “Boulogne sur Mer”? Spanish Wikipedia isn’t much help.
For the last one, my trusty Diccionario de gentilicios y topónimos gives bolonés, bolenés, and (God save the mark) gesoriacense. It doesn’t include the others, but here are some chosen at random: Asolo (Italy) > acelumita, Bourg-la-Reine (France) > reginaborgiense, Brooklyn (US) > brooklynita, Darlington (England) > darlingtoniano, Esztergom (Hungary) > estrigonio, Hildesheim (Germany) > hildesheimés, Kirman (Persia) > kirmaní, Timgad (Algeria) > tamugadense, Winchester (England) > vinoviense, vintoniense, Windsor (England) > vindonense. Oh, and here’s a nice one: Zweibrücken (Germany) > bipontino.
Re Argentina, I always think of Julio Cortazar’s childhood home, Banfield.
And re French in the Midwest, there’s Terre Haute, Indiana, now pronounced Terra Hote, though I’ve heard that the local pronunciation is, or was, Turryhut.
Champaign, named for Champaign County, Ohio, with wikipedia not venturing an opinion as to the motivation for giving that bit of Ohio a French-origin name in 1805.
It was named for the loanword champaign ‘An expanse of level, open country, a plain; a level field; a clearing’, now obsolete. The OED gives references going back to ca. 1400, and as late as the 19th century: “Toward the South, and in the champine” (Douay Bible), “Fair Champain with less rivers interveind.” (Milton), “Looking round the champaign wide” (Keats), “And riversundered champaign clothed with corn” (Tennyson), and “These rising grounds command the champaign below” (Emerson).
Whence later also ‘field’ and ‘battlefield’. The doublet campaign is a later borrowing.
A champaign is a “kankakee”, if you will..
As a former resident of Champaign and Urbana, Ill., I notice that the stress seems to have originally been on the first syllable. It moved to the second, probably under the influence of the wine.
Urbana (Champaign Co., Ill.) was also named after Urbana (Champaign Co., Ohio). There are six others as well. Now that I think about it, it’s a pretty dorky name.
It would be sort of nice if Urbana were more urban and Champaign were more rural, but I felt that if anything, it’s the other way around.
I always assumed that the settlers from Urbana, Ohio, simply headed west on I-70 and I-74 till they found what looked like a good place to found a new Urbana.
If you depart from Urbana, Illinois to drive the approx. 50 miles northwest to the more invitingly-named Normal, Illinois, you will en route pass right through (at least if you stay off the interstate) the village of Mahomet, Illinois. Wikipedia offers various conflicting theories about the name’s origin, the most interesting of which (although it strains credulity a bit) is that the name was given by a recent arrival from Connecticut familiar with the century-earlier career of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahomet_Weyonomon.
Normal, Illinois has an indirectly French-origin name, because the now-archaic American phrase “normal school” seems to have been a calque of the earlier French “École normale,” and the municipality is the site of the onetime normal school now trading as Illinois State University.
@Vanya: they are fully nativised: /ˈuɾ.liŋ.gam/, /ˈtem.peɾ.lej/, /buˈlon suɾˈmeɾ/, /ˈban.fjel/
Vanya was asking about demonyms, not pronunciations.
Urbana (Champaign Co., Ill.) was also named after Urbana (Champaign Co., Ohio). There are six others as well. Now that I think about it, it’s a pretty dorky name.
Apparently one of the theories for the origin is that the Urbana in Ohio was in turn named after the town of Urbanna, Virginia (Middlesex Co.), whose name translates to “city of [Queen] Anne”. Not sure if this makes the name particularly less dorky, though…
My inner dork was disappointed to learn that Townsville, Queensland is named after one Robert Towns, but pleased to learn that its CBD is legally called Townsville City. I hope there is a shopping mall there called Townsville City Village.
Vanya was asking about demonyms
But Vanya said toponyms, not demonyms
Yes, but I assumed he meant “What happens to foreign toponyms [when they get turned into demonyms],” since that had been the topic of discussion.
Mollymolly is right, I was asking about the local pronunciation of foreign toponyms. The demonym question/answer is arguably more interesting but I missed that we were discussing that in this thread.
Oh! Well, my apologies to all concerned.