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.
As is only right.
I cannot say about “echt” but Alaskans say PROO-doh, as well as smowmachine and call the largest mountain in North America Denali. People in Lower 48 may do as they please.
There was a William Prudhoe, born in Sunderland, emigrated to NZ 1859, Mayor of my City 1891 obit. There’s a Prudhoe Lane named for the family, in a suburb I hardly ever visit.
1891 was when the first department store in the City got electric lighting. J. Ballantyne & Co. still trading in the City centre. (A time of simple pleasures. First traffic lights installed 1930; I’ve heard folk used to go to the intersection just to admire them changing. First escalator 1939, also in a department store.)
“Smowmachine”??
(The echt Alaskans of now are not those of 1973.)
Ok, snow machine.
And what about “the waves of the Bering Sea batter the granite riprap frontage.”? Riprap??
the waves of the Bering Sea batter the granite riprap frontage
This is one of those code phrases that old-school spies use to establish their bona fides when meeting a contact. The correct response is “and the Harmattan dusts the floor of the ancient mosque of Larabanga.”
Riprap is pretty standard in the shoreline engineering trade, I believe. I do find WAry’s etymology, “Apparently a reduplication (with vowel dissimilation) of rap (‘blow, stroke’)”, to be suspect.
Riprap. It’s a pretty standard word, as Y says; my high school literary magazine (of which I was literary editor) was called Riprap (after this Gary Snyder poem).
Re “riprap”: I have a pretty large passive vocabulary, but I — even I! — have never seen this word. Maybe it’s a mainly a technical expression (?).
If you don’t live near a North American coast, you might not run into it. I have only because I do.
Interesting – I was going to suggest ‘prood-uh’ (with the ‘oo’ more ‘tu’ than ‘vous’), but that may just be my own best guess at the Geordie vowel.
I always have to look up the names of the mergers, but I think their single FOOT-STRUT vowel does tend to come out as something that I would put in my own merged FOOT-GOOSE category, unless I know for sure that it isn’t.
It certainly doesn’t rhyme with ‘udder’ for me! Local pronunciation does end with a schwa (or similar, I’m not good with schwas), but I’m not certain whether the pronunciation with final ‘-oh’ is *wrong*, or just the same idea as Glasgow ending with ‘-ah’ in a strong local accent and ‘-oh’ otherwise.
Nothing to do with the topic in question, but DE may be amused to know that I was in Glasgow yesterday, and came across a sign telling you what to do in a power cut – in Welsh first and English second. Yr Hen Ogledd indeed!
(It was also one of those electronic signs, so presumably not much use in a power cut, but you can’t have everything.)
Y: OO as in “boot, suit, roof”
Roof isn’t a good example. In first grade, one week the theme of our weekly spelling words was words with “oo,” which the textbook illustrated with a book and a moon, showing the two different possible pronunciations. At one point, Mrs. Teran was going through other “oo” words with us. We went around in a circle, and she gave each of us a word with “oo”; we would say which set it belonged to. I got roof, and there was some brief confusion, because while I (and most people) put it in the MOON set, Mrs. Teran’s pronunciation used the BOOK vowel.
Yr Hen Ogledd indeed!
Yr Alban am byth!
Brett’s example is interesting because all of the prescriptivist teachers of my own childhood would have agreed that Mrs. Teran was modeling the WRONG (i.e. the one deprecated-as-rustic-and-low-class) pronunciation for “roof.”
Mrs. Teran was solidly committed to teaching language as it is actually used. At age six, I didn’t understand how unusual that actually was.
Many years ago I helped build riprap to repair trails in the back country of Yosemite. Even worked with a ranger who knew Dirty Shirt Murphy, but not Gary Snyder.
Re “riprap”: I have a pretty large passive vocabulary, but I — even I! — have never seen this word. Maybe it’s a mainly a technical expression (?).
If you were living on the New England coast in the 1990s, The Army Corps of Engineers would have moved rip rap from ‘unknown’ to active vocabulary after a storm caused serious coastal erosion. Most residents had never heard the term, and abruptly had their lexicon enlarged.
Looking for photos of it, I found a supplier that calls it surge stone, with “(rip-rap)” following.
I grew up on the Ohio River and knew “riprap” from an early age.
Yosemite is quite a ways inland and uphill from the Pacific, but of course erosion and the desire to prevent it are not solely or even primarily oceanfront things.
The OED’s senses are
(That’s the prank of knocking on a door and running away, previously discussed here.)
For the etymology, it says,
(Rip v.1 is the ordinary word meaning “tear”, and ripple v.3 is the ordinary verb relating to small waves.)
So it appears Y was right to be wary of WAry. Its etymology may apply to sense it doesn’t give.
(IETA: I’m sure I’d long seen riprap on the shore of Lake Erie, but I learned it in college from the Snyder poem.)
@Brett: Mrs. Teran was solidly committed to teaching language as it is actually used.
So how did she handle differences in usage between her usage and that of most of her students?
My father used the FOOT vowel in “roof” and “root”. He occasionally received prescriptive comments, including from his wife and children. For some reason, I don’t remember how his parents and his brother pronounced those words.
Oh, the only pronunciation I’ve heard and used for “Prudhoe” is /ˈpruːdoʊ/, relating only to the bay in Alaska, but I’ve only ever heard it from the news media.
@Brett: I was quoting the pronunciation guide from the book, so as to best reflect the author’s accent.
Re “riprap”: I have a pretty large passive vocabulary, but I — even I! — have never seen this word. Maybe it’s a mainly a technical expression (?).
No, you simply haven’t run across it. The English wordhoard is huge, and even those of us who read a lot and have large passive vocabularies have to resign ourselves to endlessly coming across words we haven’t seen before (and resist the temptation to assume “since I haven’t seen it, it must be technical, vanishingly rare, etc.”).
I’m a New Englander who drove to Prudhoe Bay in autumn 1998. Echoing D.O., I can confirm that we heard “Prudhoe” pronounced “PROO-doh” everywhere we went, including the locale itself, where we spent the night. We had a guided tour of the area that involved touching the pipeline and even walking on (frozen) Arctic Ocean water.
I’ll mention riprap, too, since it’s a word I’d never heard until my husband bought tons and tons of it for various uses in our yard. It’s very useful stuff for building stone walls! And though we don’t have a snowmachine, that’s a word/term I heard a fair bit growing up in northern New England.
@Jerry Friedman: I don’t recall the issue if different accents or dialects coming up in class, except that one time with the pronunciation of roof. She must have thought about it, but I don’t know what her overall policy was. There was a line she had to walk, allowing for variations in native speech,* but pointing out the mechanical errors first graders were still prone to make. While Mrs. Teran had no problem with something like, ” Me and Eric saw a movie,” she would not have accepted, “Me and Eric seed a movie.”
With the roof pronunciation, she was initially confused when I put it in the MOON set. Me not giving the answer she expected surprised her. However, several classmates chimed in to agree with me when she questioned my answer. She had been coming up with the words extemporaneously and just hadn’t noticed that roof could have either pronunciation. When the situation became clear, she told us that either way of saying it was fine, and that her BOOK version was probably less common than the MOON one.
* I think all the kids in my class that year were white, Hispanic, or Asian, all having grown up speaking English from a very early age.
It seems that riprap is now used as a general mass noun for large rocks used for whatever purpose, such as for landscaping. Google Shopping shows riprap being sold by the ton, with no particular indication of use near water.
On the Maca[o/u] piece of the OP, the “alternatively called A-Ma” bit about the goddess is explained at the further link as just “A-Ma, also spelled Ah-Ma (阿媽; ‘Mother’, ‘Grandmother’), a popular name in Macau.” FWIW that’s how my sons refer to their (Taiwanese) maternal grandmother. My wife writes it as unhyphenated “Ah Ma,” but I don’t think she’s necessarily committed to any sort of consistent romanization scheme for Taiwanese.
阿媽; ‘Mother’
Recently mentioned, in a much less decent context.
I probably learned what riprap was while living in Berkeley. The word conjures up images of the waterfront there.