I have been made aware that “the small South Pacific country formerly known as Nauru” has officially changed its name to Naoero (NY Times story). That is, of course, its right, but my immediate question is: how do you say the new name? The Times has this infuriating paragraph:
How the new name is pronounced depends in part on one’s accent. British, Australian and American English speakers variously pronounce it nah-OO-roo, now-AIR-o or nah-oh-EH-roh.
Well, isn’t that nice! Maybe some people pronounce it Fanshaw. But my question is, how is it pronounced in Nauruan? Anybody know?
This seems to suggest that even in the national anthem, the name appears as “Nauru”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nauru_Bwiema
Nauruan in general seems to be particularly underdescribed, even for a Micronesian language, judging by what appears in Blust’s The Austronesian Languages.
The Wikipedia article on Nauru suggests [ˈnao̯ɛro] (so the closest reasonable English imitation would be something like NOW-ə-roh), but with no citation.
The relevant question does seem like it ought to be how do they expect it to be pronounced in English? The claim is Out There that “Nauru” itself was always an attempted concession to foreigners who couldn’t pronounce the Real Thing, but it does not seem well-sourced. See, e.g., German wikipedia’s “Das Wort „Nauru“ wurde später von „Naoero“ abgeleitet, damit Ausländer den Namen der Insel richtig aussprechen konnten,” which really seems like it should be followed by whatever the German idiom is for Citation Needed.
The Grauniad says „ Commonly known abroad by the pronunciation of Now-roo, the new name is spoken as Now-ero.“
According to Russian Wikipedia, stress is always penultimate in words that end in vowels, suggesting what the NYT calls the „American“ pronunciation („nah-oh-EH-roh“) is reasonably close.
I’m not seeing how nah-OO-roo—now-AIR-o—nah-oh-EH-roh result from differences of accent. It seems more like tomato (tomayto—tomahto) than foehn (fayn—furn)
The second and third seem like they’d be pretty similar in some accents, including mine. The first is totally different though.