I’m a sucker for unpredictable pronunciations of place names and have posted about them more than once (e.g., in 2003 and 2007), so I was delighted to run across the website North Carolina place names:
From the mountains to the coast, place names in North Carolina can be confusing. (Why don’t Rowan and Chowan rhyme?) Click on the map below to hear North Carolina county names pronounced by local authors Bland Simpson and Michael McFee. The list that follows it includes cities, towns, mountains, lakes, and more.
It is wonderful to have audio files for all these place names, especially to verify what looks impossible, e.g. Cajahs Mountain = KAY-JUH Mountain. Click and enjoy! (Via Joel at Far Outliers, where you’ll find a selection of the weirder ones.)
During the recent NC flooding I watched a report on my local (DC area) news in which the reporter was talking about conditions in BYOO-FURT. I assumed this was the correct regional pronunciation of Beaufort, but according to the website it should be pronounced BO-FURT, which is what I would have guessed. Maybe the reporter was an out-of-towner making a bad guess.
Edit: oh wait, now I realize the flooding was in SC, which has its own Beaufort. Perhaps they say it differently to distinguish between the two.
What you describe the reporter using is the correct pronunciation for the South Carolina Beaufort. The SC town is also larger and is one of the locations in the Carolinas for which weather forecasts are frequently stated.
The Beaufort wind force scale, however, is BO-furt; it was named after its inventor.
According to Wikipedia, Beaufort, NC is /ˈboʊfərt/ and Beaufort, SC is /ˈbjuːfərt/. Oddly enough, the latter is named after Henry Somerset, 2nd Duke of Beaufort (1684–1714), but the British pronunciation now used for the dukedom of Beaufort is /ˈbəʊfət/. Perhaps it was pronounced like Beaulieu /ˈbjuːli/ 300+ years ago. But then the other Beaufort commemorates Henry Somerset-Scudamore, 3rd Duke of Beaufort, and was named in 1712, only one year later than its non-homophonous namesake. I have heard heard Beaumaris, Anglesey, pronounced both ways (though I think it’s always /bjuːˈmærɪs/ locally), so perhaps the pronunciation was simply variable at the time.
“Henry Fielding [18C novelist, dramatist, magistrate, and founder of London’s first professional police force] being once in company with the Earl of Denbigh, and the conversation turning on Fielding’s being of the Denbigh family, the Earl asked the reason why they spelt their names differently; the Earl’s family doing it with the E first (Feilding), and Mr. Henry Fielding with the I first (Fielding). ‘I cannot tell, my Lord,’ answered Harry, ‘except it be that my branch of the family were the first that knew how to spell.’” —John Nichol
Fielding/Feilding is of course /ˈfiːldɪŋ/, and Denbigh is /ˈdɛnbi/, where /i/ is (as in John Wells’s transcriptions/ either /ɪ/ or /iː/ depending on the state of happy-tensing, which did not exist in the 18C.
My own family descends (along with all Eddishaws and Eddershaws) via a long line of subliteracy and inaudible mumbling to an eighteenth-century John Hithersay. The form used in my branch goes back only to my great-grandfather. Spelling! who needs it? A mere bourgeois affectation!
Or as a particularly felicitous typo in a book I once read had it, “A la-di-da affectatation.” As I have noted before, my grandfather spelled his name John Coen and pronounced it Shaun a-Cawn”.
A few generations back, an ancestor of mine was (at least) buried as Rosol instead of Rossoll, reportedly because every letter on the tombstone cost. Of course the ll is most likely a graphic misinterpretation of ł to begin with; we seem to be auf der Nudelsuppe dahergeschwommen (“arrived out of nowhere with no idea”).
DM: auf der Nudelsuppe dahergeschwommen
Is it literally (and more colourfully): arrived swimming in the noodle soup ?
Yes.
except it be that my branch of the family were the first that knew how to spell
Now I’m wondering if that were is a subjunctive II or a matter of treating family as a plural.
How is family relevant? It’s “branch of the family” that’s the subject of “were,” and it’s singular.
Okay then. Treating branch as a plural, I suppose.
I would love to know the origin of the name for WALKER ISLAND (Dare County). Does anyone know where I can find this information> Many thanks.
Google suggests it might be mentioned in “The Outer Banks Gazetteer: The History of Place Names from Carova to Emerald Isle” by Roger L. Payne. Unfortunately I can’t find a freely accessible copy of the book anywhere.
I suspect it’s a surname of local settlers.
My library has electronic access to The Outer Banks Gazetteer. It has information where it is known, but offers no history at all for Walker Island, just minimal geographical information, and that it was historically referred to as Walkers Island as well.
Good luck, Mr. Walker! I hope it turns out to be named after a relative of yours.
As a longtime resident of Durham NC I do often hear DERR-um, but also often DURR-um, and occasionally a one-syllable attempt, DURM.
I’m not clear what distinction you’re making between DERR-um and DURR-um; to me they’re equivalent.
I’d guess “error” and “urn”.
Next: “bury” (rhyming with “airy” for me).
Well, for that I’d write “DARE-um.” Do people really pronounce Durham like that?
I’d guess with schwa vs. with a rounded u-vowel.
> Next: “bury” (rhyming with “airy” for me).
My aunt says bury with an urn vowel. She has three vwels for bury/berry/Barry where I have one. I know my dad merged berry and Barry but I think he kept bury separate. It’s been a while since, sigh, we buried him.
My aunt is 95. Their lect is probably mostly Pittsburgh though they were born in Philly. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone else say burry for bury.
I watched Amrum this week and liked it. I thought I picked up the recommendation here but couldn’t find it.
I have a question maybe for David M. In the opening scene, someone says something like Det sam Shiesken, which is translated as They are Germans. I’m assuming this is in a Frisian dialect (Oomrang) but am wondering about it, and about what exactly Shiesken means or how derived.
It’s an interesting introduction of a motif – calling the Silesian refugees Polacks in a not quite German dialect. And the boy being bullied for being not quite Oomrang because he doesn’t speak the dialect. I’m wondering how much to read into it. Is the implication that some of the dissent on Amrum is linked to an identity that may be less German? Or is it the common theme of uncertain adolescent identity?
The -bury suffix in place names is “burry” for some speakers, although that could involve analogy from the etymologically-related -borough/-burg suffixes. That’s what makes the Suffolk toponym “Bury St. Edmund’s” seem like a trick question – is it the verb or is it the suffix transposed into a prefix?
The joys of the (marry-)merry-Mary merger.
Bury (the verb) is a separate matter. It’s pronounced the same as berry in much of England, too; it has its mainstream pronunciation from one dialect and its spelling from another, following the repopulation of London after the Black Death and the ensuing lopsided dialect mixture.
I don’t know that movie at all, and North Frisian is far beyond my paygrade (or pretty much anyone’s).
Born elsewhere to my Mother raised in Chowan County NC. We visited when I was a kid. Interviewed at Duke in 1968. Grad school starting 1983. In phonetics a rooky, I merely reported perceived range of ways folk say Durham. Clump or split as you wish.
How do you syllabify bury? I would say /bɹ̩.ɹi/, except that’s weird.
I thought you’d memorized all the sound changes so that you could work your way into any Germanic language, cognate by cognate, DM.
It’s an interesting scene. A man is driving a wagon with a trail of refugee kids behind him. He says what I hear as Gut dai, Tessa. They exchange some words to the effect that the children have been sent because the Russians are 50 km from Berlin to which she replies that At least it means Hitler’s war will end. If I’m hearing any of that right, war is “krich” with an English -ch. so I think this exchange is all in Frisian.
Then she says something like Snade o Shiesk, translated as do they speak German? and he responds They ARE German (as above), whereupon the two women say guten tag to the children and they respond the same.
At other times the islanders seem to greet each other with Howdy. I thought that had a derivation clipped from How do you do? I’m wondering whether there is actually an older Germanic cognate. But the movie has another motif – that many of the islanders had gone to New York, then returned when the depression hit. So maybe this is just a bit of English.
It felt like the languages of the movie added color that I could only see through a dirty window, knowing essentially no German and absolutely no Frisian. It’s only because I noticed they hadn’t used a recognizable word for German that I caught any of it.
I’ll leave this here against the day when someone who does know North Frisian drops by, or a German speaker who saw the movie and can explain the interplay better, since it always happens eventually here at the Hattery.
The Öömrang word for ‘German’ is Sjisk. You heard it well.
Do any varieties of modern Dutch preserve the *-sk?
Ah yes. That’s the West Frisian Wikipedia. In Oersettings (“translations”), click on Utklappe (“open by flipping the lid”, German ausklappen from Klappe “flappable plate”), and find:
So Sjisk is cognate with Dutsk/Deutsch I didn’t see that coming. I feel like I should have anticipated it as a possibility.
I miscopied and dropped an i. It is Sjiisk.
I don’t understand the Öömrang thing. Wikipedia: “Öömrang refers to the Öömrang Frisian name of Amrum, which is Oomram.” So Öömrang is somehow derived from Oomram?
Yes. Told you North Frisian is above everyone’s pay grade. ^_^
…Actually, this one looks almost simple: -um or evidently -am is reduced from the cognate of home; drop that, add -ing as in Fleming, and then maliciously change the i to a (which the other listed dialects notably haven’t done).
Dank!
What motivates the umlaut going from Oomram to Öömrang?
I guess a language with 21 vowels (and 7 diphthongs) might as well use them freely.
Historically the *-ing. How it works nowadays I have no idea.