Pronunciation of "Ngaio"

[Laurence Horn]

At 8:31 PM -0400 5/8/09, Herb Stahlke wrote:
>Further searching shows up the following from Bruce Harding's
>biographical essay at
>http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-Whi071Kota-t1-g1-t10.html.  But
>this still sounds like an Anglicization.
>
>
>Edith Ngaio Marsh's Taurian date of birth was both richly symbolic and
>portentous, given that 23 April is both St George's Day and the
>legendary birthdate of Marsh's beloved Bard, Shakespeare...

I have nothing interesting to contribute on
"Ngaio", which I've always pronounced ['Naio]
when I've had the (rare) occasion to refer to
her, but I'm sure I'm being influenced by my
years of studying Swahili, which left me with a
frustrated desire to pronounce initial velar
nasals.  But seeing the reference to her
"portentous" date of birth reminds me of my
double-take earlier today when I was listening to
an audiotape of a very British novel (a book by
Kingsley Amis that happens to feature
disagreements about "trendy pronunciations") and
hearing the narrator, with his RP pronunciation,
refer to something being "portentious".  I
suppose this isn't really a question of  accent
or dialect, though, just an assimilation of
"portentous" with the much larger class that
includes e.g. "pretentious", à la "nucular".

LH

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