Naomi (was: how is it pronounced)

[Benjamin Barrett]

I was being serious.

After I posted, an even more difficult problem occurred to me:
Stephen. It seems there is a wide dialect trend, but even so, you have
to ask the owner how to pronounce his name. I think this even goes for
Steven, though I'm not sure.

BB

On Feb 10, 2009, at 6:38 AM, Wilson Gray wrote:

> 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. ;-)

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org