Preakness

[Damien Hall]

As I'm not American, people should tell me if I am simply behind the times.
But
I wonder whether I have noticed an old sound-change very belatedly coming to
completion.

>From my reading, the name of Preakness (NJ) is a member of the small class of
words (eg *great*, *break*) which were not included in the sound-change whereby
<ea> came to be pronounced [i:];  according to my reading, Preakness, NJ is
pronounced [preiknIs].

But, twice in the last two days, I've heard National Public Radio announcers
pronounce it [prikn at s] ([@] = schwa).  Is this widely-attested?  Could we be
witnessing a change in the normative pronunciation?

If we are, I wonder how Leakey, Texas is now pronounced.  I've read that it's
normatively [laeiki] ([ae] = single phoneme).

Damien Hall
University of Pennsylvania