"Andrea"

[Baboukis, Constance]

If she's Greek, her name is AndreAna.  Andrea is her American name
however she pronounces it.  Andrea(s) is a male name in Modern Greek,
pronounced the same as the Italian name.

CH for TS is a dialectal pronunciation in Greece, heard in outlying
areas and some villages but not in the cities or on radio and TV
(except to depict an uneducated rural person).  I suspect that now
that everyone in Greek villages has electricity and owns radios and
TVs (and goes to school), colorful pronunciations will be heard only
in the most remote areas.

Connie Baboukis
U.S. Dictionaries, Oxford University Press


-----Original Message-----
From: Wilson Gray [mailto:hwgray at GMAIL.COM]
Sent: Thursday, January 05, 2006 6:35 PM
Subject: Re: "Andrea"


That could very well be the case. I'm (relatively) familiar only with
Homeric Greek. The only thing that I know about Modern Greek - I read
this somewhere and several native-speaker friends and colleagues have
confirmed it - pronouncing the digraph TS [tau sigma] as English CH -
[C], i.e. ch as in "cherry" - is a sign of lower-class origin. The
spelling pronunciation is the "proper" one.

-Wilson


On 1/5/06, David Bergdahl <einstein at frognet.net> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       David Bergdahl <einstein at FROGNET.NET>
> Subject:      Re: "Andrea"
>
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>
> A colleague's wife (she's from a Greek family from Salt Lake City,
UT) named
> her daughter 'anDREa'--I always thought it was a Greek
pronunciation.  The
> girl is in her 30s now.
>