Post edited 12:44PM – Jun-18-09 by Glenn
Names — of places or people — are tremendously tricky. For names of people I prefer the way they say or said it themselves. The same goes for places: I give preference to the CAREFUL or STANDARD local pronunciation, or my best approximation of it.
I think that the pronunciation of New Orleans is often like /NAWlins/ in rapid speaking, but if asked to say the name of the city, locals would say something more like /noWAlins/ with three syllables. I would therefore consider /noWAlins/ for my pronunciation. But I might still tailor it to my audience: if I uspect they are all from north of the Mason-Dixon line, in the interest of communication, I would use /nuORlins/.
Of course, there are ample exceptions of the local pronunciation rule, especially with foreign names and places. I would pronounce Louis XIV as /Loowee/ “the fourteenth,” not /Loowis/, and I would not try to pass off the French for fourteenth unless I knew the audience. Likewise, I would say Confucius, and not the the Mandarin equivalent, Kong Zi, unless it was a specialized audience.
But the movement is strong to a more modern policy of approximating local pronunciation. In recent years Peking became Beijing and Bombay became Mumbai. There are many other examples.
But we’ll always have Paris in the springtime.
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