Naomi (was: how is it pronounced)

[Wilson Gray]

I don't think that anyone is being serious in this thread, only
facetious. So long ago that I can't remember when, I learned that a
proper name is correctly pronounced as its owner says it is.

If someone told me that her name, spelled "Naomi," was pronounced [naj
'o mi], then that's the pronunciation that I would use. It would never
occur to me to "correct" that to [nej o' mi]. OTOH, I choose to
mispronounce certain trade names that I find annoying, e.g. ['vE rI
"zOn] and not [v@ 'ray zn].

It happens to be the case that 99.44% of my experience is that people
named "Naomi" pronounce it [nej 'o mi]. This is also the pronunciation
that I was taught to use for the name of the Biblical personage. OTOH,
my wife says that *100%* of her experience is that the proper
pronunciation is [naj 'o mi]. She thought, at first, that my claim
that I used [nej o' mi] was yet another of my annoying linguistic
jokes whose points generally escape her.

The real point of my original post was that you never know. Two
people, both native speakers of the same language, yet they have
differing experiences of that language. Needless to say, there's
nothing intrinsically interesting about this. However, it is, after
all, a *dialect* split. ;-)

-Wilson


–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Mark Twain



On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 9:52 AM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Naomi (was: how is it pronounced)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> i'm puzzled by this thread, with its presupposition that there's one
> correct pronunciation for this name.  i've encountered women named
> Naomi who pronounced it with [e] in the first syllable and others who
> pronounced it with [a] in the first syllable.  both pronunciations are
> phonologically well-formed for me, so i try to use the one used by the
> bearers of the name.  the [e] version, which is (i'm pretty sure) the
> more frequent variant, is the default for me, the one i use  when i
> know someone's name only through print.  but i don't think that makes
> it the *correct* pronunciation.
>
> there are many parallels -- Lehman with [e] or [i], for instance.
>
> arnold
>
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