The Canadian Navy and the news

[Gary Holton]

Curious that the navy would choose "Athabaskan," given the traditional
Canadian spelling "Athapaskan."



On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 12:25 PM, James Crippen <jcrippen at gmail.com> wrote:
> The earthquake disaster in Haiti elicited a response from the Canadian
> Navy / La Marine canadienne, which involved sending two ships, the
> frigate HMCS Halifax and the destroyer HMCS Athabaskan. The latter is
> from the Iroquois class, a series of destroyers named after Canada's
> indigenous peoples
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois_class_destroyer). This results
> in me seeing a lot of news articles via my searches for Athabaskan.
> Interestingly, I also see a few articles about the "Athabascan". So it
> seems that even though the name of the ship is fixed, people still
> can't agree on how to spell the name. I should note that I've seen
> nothing about the "Athapaskan" or "Athapascan", confirming Joyce
> McDonough's suspicion that people always pronounce the name with a
> voiced stop.
>
> Cheers,
> James
>