Clatskanie, Mungindi.

The Log recently featured the name of an Oregon city called Clatskanie. The Log post forbade anyone to look up the pronunciation and insisted that everyone guess, which seemed both overbearing and silly to me — the interesting thing is how it actually is pronounced, which is (per Wikipedia, and who would make up such a thing?) /ˈklætskɪnaɪ/ (i.e. KLATS-ki-nye), named after the Tlatskanai tribe. And in the comments, Julian provided this wonderful story:

Joke/urban myth:
A young Australian overseas has lost his passport. Goes to the consulate to get a replacement.
The official has to check his bona fides of course.
“Where do you come from, mate?”
“Mungindi.”
“You’re good. Only someone who comes from Mungindi would know how to say that.”

But Julian too (perhaps overawed by the presentation of the post) avoided giving the pronunciation, which (again according to Wikipedia) is /ˈmʌŋɪndaɪ/ (MUNG-in-dye), which is said to mean ‘water hole in the river’ in Gamilaraay. As I’ve said many times, I love unpredictable local pronunciations!

Comments

  1. I wonder if /ˈhɜːrɪkən/ (HUR-ih-kən) is how the locals say the common noun as well?

  2. Nah, they talk pretty normal these days, and they know how to say hurricane. The local rural accent of days not-too-long gone by was popularly most noted for merging “orr” into “arr”, in words such as “formal” (*farmal) and “orange”.
    This particularity is said to account for my great grandfather’s middle name: allegedly, he was to be named after his own grandfather, Morten Peder Mortensen (Denmark 1828). Instead his name came out as James Martin Smith.

  3. Jen in Edinburgh says

    I’m not sure what the difference is between ɜ and ʌ, but HUR-ih-kən doesn’t seem that odd to me – it’s more or less the OED’s first listed pronunciation (although mine is more like the second).

  4. Yes, I had the same reaction.

  5. Keith Ivey says

    Same here, using a schwa in the last syllable of “hurricane” is not what I do, but it’s not like reducing the last vowel in “robot”.

  6. On Tooele:

    Wick Miller, the great Uto-Aztecanist, wrote, in a letter to the editor of the Salt Lake Tribune (Mar. 4th, 1985, p. A11):

    I note a brief blurb in the paper in which Sen. Karl G. Swan of Tooele gives an explanation for the name of his home town. He explains that the town, once spelled “Tuilla,” was named after a well-known Indian chief and medicine man of that name, and “loosely translated” it means “tall grass.”

    The senator is correct about the source of the name, but his translation is a bit loose.

    In Goshute Shoshone the word is spelled “Tuuweta,” which would be pronounced something like “Toowuda” in English: it means “black” (tuu) “bear” (weta). The etymology can be checked with members of the Bear family, descendants of the Goshute Shoshone chief who still live in Tooele.

    A reply appeared on the 20th (p. A11), by Wendy Hassibe, President of the Utah Place Name Society:

    In response to the Forum letter from Wick R. Miller regarding origin of the name “Tooele.”

    Several explanations of the origin of the name “Tooele” have been offered. Orrin P Miller, a longtime resident of Tooele and active member of the Utah Place Names Society, suggests that “Captain Howard Stansbury, during his survey and mapping of the Great Salt Lake and its environs, assigned the name of Tuilla to what is now called Tooele Valley.

    “The name Tuilla appears on the townsite map made of Tooele City by Jesse Fox in 1853 and on the townsite maps surveyed by Craig in 1856.” Howard Clegg of Tooele reports the word Tuilla was the Shoshone word for tall grass.

    In a 1940 publication of the Work Projects Administration, Utah Writers Project, several suggestions are made as to the origin: 1 — It derived its name from a Goshute Indian word “tuilla” used to designate a species of flag that grew near the springs in this region; 2 — the name is a corruption of the Spanish word “tule” for rushes; 3 — named for an Indian chief, Tuilla, who is said to have lived there many years before the white man came and 4 — named for the Mattuglio Valley in southern Europe because of its topographic similarity.

    The Utah Place Names Society meets monthly to discuss these types of questions and promote the collection of place-name information.

    I haven’t found a fitting Shoshone word for any flag/grass, but I didn’t look very hard. For now, I’ll trust Miller. Are there other examples of English borrowing [d] as /l/?

  7. Bright’s Native American Placenames of the United States gives a more precise [tuuwɨɨra].

    Tooele Valley is right by the Oquirrh Mountains, BTW.

  8. David Eddyshaw says

    Scotland has (among others) Kircudbright and Milngavie; the pronunciation of both is given slightly wrongly in WP, too. (Both are familiar names to me from my youth, and I have no /l/ in “Milngavie.” Or /n/, or /v/ … nor is the first vowel /ɪ/.)

    The pronunciation of Kirkcaldy is less remote from the spelling, but also has no /l/.

  9. Kirkcudbright is famous for its forecastles, no doubt.

  10. David Eddyshaw says

    Aye, nae doot.

  11. I have no /l/ in “Milngavie.” Or /n/, or /v/ … nor is the first vowel /ɪ/.

    So how do you say it?

  12. David Eddyshaw says

    Mow-GUY.

    (If it’s really from “Muileann Gaoithe”, as WP says, presumably the /v/ was never actually there in the first place.)

  13. Jen in Edinburgh says

    Wikipedia gives /mʌlˈɡaɪ/ as the pronunciation, so I’m not actually sure what DE is arguing with. My first syllable is closer to /ɪ/, though and I do have an l…

    Definitely no n or v, though!

  14. David Eddyshaw says

    I think I last spoke the name in the wild over fifty years ago, so it is quite possible that the Young People of Today have introduced /l/ from the spelling since then.

    (They’ll be saying /’mɛnzɪz/ for “Menzies” next. I don’t know what the world is coming to.)

  15. Stu Clayton says

    /ˈmɪŋɪs/ MING-iss !

  16. David Eddyshaw says

    Quite so.
    We must treasure the ways of the Ancients.

    (I am sorry to say that even younger members of my own family had been known to mispronounce the name of the bookshop chain John Menzies; this was later absorbed into the maw of W H Smaug, Britain’s least satisfactory retailer. Probably divine retribution.)

  17. Stu Clayton says

    In the US we pronounce words as they is wrote. We’re pretty ancient in modern terms.

    How long had the Roman empire existed before it entered its gibbous Decline ?

  18. David Eddyshaw says

    It had being going downhill ever since they stopped pronouncing the d at the end of the ablative singular.

    I blame the Bacchanalia.

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

  19. Stu Clayton says

    ibidem:

    #
    The ending -d, found on some adverbs and ablative singulars of nouns and pronouns, is lost in Classical Latin
    #

    What the devil ?! Where had the -d come from in the first place ? I can’t accept that a perfectly good end consonant was “lost”. Someone must have deliberately destroyed it.

    Or perhaps leaving it off was a coded signal.

  20. David Eddyshaw says

    Those Bacchanalians were devious b*s. There is some evidence that they also operated space lasers to control the weather.

  21. Using the ablative d was a coded signal. Then they code-switched.

  22. One of the oldest surviving linguistics sites around is a Kamilaroi/Gamilaraay dictionary, by two former colleagues of mine at SOAS. Can’t see anything there that would fit the “waterhole in the river” etymology for Mungindi…

  23. J.W. Brewer says

    By the time Menzieses had made it far enough inland and uphill to reach Swain County, North Carolina (up in the Great Smokies and right against the Tennessee state line) they had decided to join rather than fight the American tendency to spelling pronunciations and changed the surname to “Mingus.” The Swain County Minguses have white, black, and mixed-race descendants, of whom the most prominent is the legendary jazzman Charles (Jr.). More here from the National Park Service, which is now in possession of the historic Mingus Mill. https://www.nps.gov/grsm/learn/historyculture/the-daniel-mingus-family.htm

    FWIW Swain County contains not only Mingus Mill but the (technically unincorporated) town of Cherokee, N.C., which is subject to the residual sovereignty of the Eastern Band of Cherokees and where quite a lot of the public signage is both bilingual and biscriptal.

  24. David Eddyshaw says

    “Colquhoun” is another Scottish name where the “l” is purely decorative. As far as I can make out, it was never actually pronounced in the first place, before the rise of Horrid Spelling Pronunciations.

    The better sort of Americans eschew such barbarities:

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

  25. Colquhoun at LH: 2004, 2008.

  26. Since you love unpredictable local pronunciations: not sure if you’ve come across Natchitoches, Louisiana yet, but that one’s pretty funny and just impossible to guess.

  27. The website of the Mungindi Progress Association says that the most commonly encountered explanation of the name is that it means ‘the place where sweet water might be found by digging’. Perhaps this can help in finding a morphological breakdown. The online dictionary of Austin and Nathan gives ganaay for ‘shallow; digging stick’, for instance.

  28. David Eddyshaw says

    That would give it the same sort of meaning as plenty of other places, after all, e.g.

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

    (Mooré búlga “spring, well.”)

    https://xkcd.com/3004/

  29. Are there other examples of English borrowing [d] as /l/?

    A name in Bright’s Colorado Place Names, from another Numic language in the same general region:

    Pahlone [pah LOH nee] Peak, in Chaffee County (12,667 ft.); also
    pronounced [pah LOHN]. The name of the son of the Ute leader Chief Ouray. The Ute word is paadunu’ni “thunder while raining.”

    Bright’s Native American Placenames of the United States breaks this down as paa- ‘water’ and a tunu’ni, relaying information from John McLaughlin. But in Givón’s dictionary, there is only ’unu’ni is ‘thunder’. I wonder where is the -d- /t/ ([ɾ] intervocalically?) from? A reduced suffix on paa- like -tʉ or -ta?

    (P.S. This name appealed to me because of Polari palone ‘woman’.)

    (P.P.S. LH readers can hear Shoshoni weta ‘bear’ pronounced at the Shoshoni Talking Dictionary. Type in bear, select bear in the pop-up list, and then click on the loudspeaker icons.)

  30. I trust fans of unpredictable local pronunciations know that the name of Ouray, Colorado, starts with a /j/ as in “your”.

  31. Looking at the map, it seems that -di placenames are in Bigambul territory, north of Gamilaraay. Mungindi is on the border. Bigambul is poorly documented.

    There might be something here but it would take a little time to go through those.

  32. not sure if you’ve come across Natchitoches, Louisiana yet, but that one’s pretty funny and just impossible to guess.

    That’s long been one of my favorites; I see it came up here in 2005.

  33. Ouray, Colorado, starts with a /j/ as in “your”

    Fits well with “Pyeblo”, aka Pueblo.

  34. Maybe I can be permitted to quote some limericks I wrote in alt.usage.english and give a couple their premier right here.

    A writer chose settings by rhyme.
    If a waltz, then New Paltz would be prime.
    The parts elegiac
    Would happen in Nyack;
    The scene of the crime was East Lyme.

    Replace the third and fourth lines with

    If someone was hatless,
    They were in Skaneateles;

    The scene in the deli
    Takes place on Fteley;

    The villain would make
    His mistake in Passaic;

    The wallflowers flee raucous
    Parties in Secaucus;

    Or replace the last three lines with

    Should a singer of “Day-O” pack
    Pistols in Mahopac,
    The scene of the crime would be Lyme.

  35. PlasticPaddy says

    @Y
    p 29
    Wargundy = home/nest of crows
    Varragundy = home/nest of fish (should this be Barragundy)?
    p 8
    Currangandi = place of many spiders
    p23
    Mulgowrie = one place for water

    if the “home/nest” element is -ngVndi, and Mu(l) is water, you could get Mungindi. But why not Mulyangindi = eagle’s nest?

  36. Good job, @PP! That all seems plausible.

    Moreover, looking at Austin’s A Reference Grammar of Gamilaraay, Mungindi does not look like it is in that language. Locative suffixes have different forms, depending on the form of the root, but all end in -a. Some other place names end in -araay or -baraay (often <-bri>), ‘having’.

  37. … But then: Curr’s vocabulary gives Kollee for ‘water’ in the language of the Dumaresque River. This is what Bowern’s comparative Pama-Nyungan database, Chirila, interprets as Bigambal, and it uses Curr for its source (presumably absent better ones).

  38. David Eddyshaw says

    Interesting note on the name of the language, from Austin’s grammar:

    The name Gamilaraay can be divided into two parts. It consists of gamil meaning ‘no’ and araay meaning ‘having’, that is ‘the people who have gamil for no’. This method of naming people after their word for ‘no’ was widespread throughout New South Wales (and Victoria); the western neighbours of the Gamilaraay were the Yuwaalaraay, who say waal for ‘no’, and the south-western neighbours were the Wayilwan who say wayil for ‘no’ (wan in their language means ‘having’).

    Same sort of principle as “Farefare” or “Jamsay.” Or “Langue d’Oc”, come to that (even closer.)

    I’ve long felt that Cockneys should really be called Wotchas.

  39. We discussed languages named after characteristic words, only weeks ago…

  40. David Eddyshaw says

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

    is another, come to think of it.

    I’m not clear from the WP article whether this (and the parallel terms for other dialects) are used in everyday life or only as technical linguistic labels, but there are certainly Hatters who will know.

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