Check out this cool thing I just stumbled on: A pronunciaton guide for frequently mispronounced S.C. places. It comes from SCIway.net, which stands for South Carolina Information Highway and is pronounded skyway, by the way.
The guide directs you on pronunciation of 100 places -- from Abbeville (AB uh vul, AB bee VIL) to Yonges (YUNGS) Island -- and gives information on the origin of some names.
In some cases, when there's no clear answer, the site took a poll. Take Clemson. In a poll of 1,155 voters, 57 percent said it's CLEM sun. Meanwhile, 37 percent said CLEMP sun and 6 percent said CLEM zun.
Lancaster is "frequently mispronounced LAN CAS tur." It's really LANG kus tur.
Beaufort is BU fort. "Visitors often confuse this town with Beaufort, N.C., which is pronounced BOW fort."
Some other possible surprises:
Cheddar: SHED ur
Clinton: CLIN nin
Cooper (the river dividing Charleston and Mount Pleasant): COO pur, CUP puh
Monticello: MONT i SELL oh (Not like Thomas Jefferson's home in Virginia, MONT i CHEL oh.)
Trio: TRY oh
Tega Cay: TEE guh
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
How do you say Clemson?
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11 comments:
Expect part II tomorrow..."How Things Are (Correctly) Said Pp North" by Amy Baldwin
Amy- I like your blog and columns. But as a supporter, perhaps you should re-think some of the topics and write about stuff that unites people and issues the city is facing as a whole (transportation, growth, crime, etc....etc).
Oh yes let's all gather around and giggle over the silly accents of the local folk. That will prove to ourselves and everyone else how superior and cosmopolitan we are.
Jeet yet? Jav nuf deet? Yaunt smore? Ear yar!
Nodamene?
Say what you will about Yankees, but dem guys are wicked smaht. (Yeah, right.)
Please, for the love of all that is good and decent, can you PLEASE talk about something useful to people who relocate here? Maybe where the best place is to get fried chicken, or the best local art galleries, or stuff that's not far from Charlotte but still worth seeing.
But enough with comparing Charlotte and the rest of the South to the North and bringing up subjects that ridicule the South. There is simply no need for it and it kind of diminishes your credibility when you continue to do it.
There is simply no need for it and it kind of diminishes your credibility when you continue to do it.
Credibility? Amy has about as much credibility as the Iraqi Information Officer.
It's CLAMP-SUN ya'll!
It doesn't matter to a true local how much fun you make of how we talk...I tell my inlaws from Ill. and Mich. that east, north, and west are directions...THE south is a place....and it's not us who stop at alligator farms, or buy fake "tommy hawks" or fake "local honey" from roadside stands in the mountains.
Hey, y'all shouldn't ridicule this interesting discussion. Carolina dialects North and South are really fascinating no matter what your interest may be in linguistics or languages.
Respectable universities could give master's and doctoral degrees in English and other humanities programs for a thorough research of conversational dialects in any of the states in the Union, in or outside the South.
Take Greenville, for example. Ever listen to a native of Greenville, S.C., pronounce the proud name of his or her hometown? The "ee" dipthong is often a bit longer and closer to the sound of the letter "e" in the alphabet, whereas if you venture over to Greenville, N.C., you may hear a shorter syllabic duration for the first half of the name combined with more of what the phonetics people call "the short e" sound, almost like the "e" in "venture" or the first "e" in "whenever."
Perhaps Observer editorial writer and former Greenville Daily Reflector staffer Mary Schulken can offer some insights on the different pronunciations of this same place name of Greenville from Down East in North Carolina to the Upstate of South Carolina.
Then if you go to Dunn or Lillington, N.C., you might hear "Harnett County" pronounced almost like "Hornet County" as in those upstart New Orleans Hornets, late of Charlotte, who almost made it past Wake Forest alumn Tim Duncan's San Antonio Spurs in Game 7 of the NBA playoffs Monday night.
So Charlotteans, try taking a break from condemning anybody or anything challenging us to learn more about what makes the Carolinas a true cultural garden spot in the Southeastern United States. Get down off your high horse for a spell and tiptoe through the, er--wildflowers. The dialects of the Carolinas are so intriguing that Will Shakespeare might have come over to Roanoke Island from Merry Ol' England to write a play or two in the 1590s or early 1600s if "the Lost Colony" hadn't gotten lost. (He was 20 years old when the first Roanoke colonists arrived in 1584.)
Take a trip to the Carolina coast and see if you can get a "dockside degree" by saying "Charleston" just like the natives do, then try your luck imitating the lingering Old English vowels pronounced naturally by natives of North Carolina's Outer Banks communities from Manteo to Swan Quarter in Dare and Hyde counties.
If you practice up, you can even stop by in Raleigh to try out your Outer Banks accent with N.C. Senate President Pro-Tem Marc Basnight of Manteo and see if he'll agree to put some funding into the hopper for Charlotte and Mecklenburg programs. (Well, maybe you should leave the lobbying to Mecklenburg's legislative delegation.)
Try saying the last two syllables of "Greensboro" like a true Upper Piedmonter, and if you can't quite master it, just wait for the next time Gate City native Jack Betts does a television interview on N.C. politics. And the one I have never been able to get just right is the refined tones in "Winston-Salem" as spoken by someone who grew up there. In local speech, Charlotte's quite "country" compared to Winston-Salem as far as I can tell. But I would like to have heard William F. Buckley Jr. say "Winston-Salem," or maybe Howard Cosell, who was from there originally.
Then if you can do all that, try for the highest plateau of Carolina linguistics by seeing if you can learn the differences between the softer, lilting speech in the Blue Ridge Mountains from West Jefferson, N.C., to Caesar's Head, S.C., and the flatter, harder tones you'll encounter when you get over into the Smoky Mountains between Asheville and the Tennessee line.
As far as how to pronounce "Clemson" is concerned, we learned a new way to say it when we were playing music in the French Quarter of New Orleans back when the Clemson football team was playing for the national championship in the Sugar Bowl in 1981: "No 1--Hold That Tiger!"
So thanks, Amy, for this great blog entry. Don't let the boo-birds get you down. Somebody graduate students at UNC Charlotte will be able to go for a Ph.D. in English, history, art, foreign languages or what have you once we can convince the good folks in Chapel Hill and Raleigh that the Carolina Piedmont is more than a collection of interchanges on the Interstates.
And if regional dialects are boring to some folks, well, there's always our geology, wildlife, riverways and rare varieties of botanical species to help you appreciate being able to call the Carolinas home.
its prononuced CLEMSE, if you think im wrong try going to seneca,SC and ask the first person you see who will win the USC/Clemson game
has anyone been able to get all the way through david mcknights post yet?
I was always an Orioles fan, but I sure am glad I got to see Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris at a Yankees-Senators game back in the 1960s.
Playing baseball came naturally for the Mick, they say, as writing about Charlotte's needs in the Carolinas does for me. But if anyone, Maris is my hero because he had to hear all those boos from hometown folks just because he was setting a home run record.
I can identify with that, and one day I will find a better home team dugout for enjoying post-game celebrations. But keep those brickbats coming, and good luck trying to dumb down the city where we high-schoolers used to read Dickens and Dostoevsky at the laundromat.
I just wish I had included the Palmetto pronunciation of "Spartanburg" in the previous post. The loss of that Spartanburg two-year-old in the mountain park accident is a heartbreaking Carolina tragedy for many people. Just ask Franklin Graham if he thinks writing can sometimes save a life. There's no reason we shouldn't keep trying.
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