Placename origin: Cassiar

[Mike Cleven]

Dave Robertson wrote:
>
> LhaXayEm.
>
> How do speakers of English pronounce the placename "Cassiar"?

to which Jana Cooley replied:

>I hope you received the info, but in case you did not it is:
>cass (as in bass) ee (as in we) are (as in are)...

;-) of course there's two ways to pronounce "bass", but this is the
fish, not the bull fiddle, that Jana is talking about here.  I should
have thought to describe the prononciation of Cassiar when I first
posted, as it's a commonly-known placename in BC but of course it isn't
stateside.  I think the previous poster who pointed out that a _Briton_
(i.e. an English speaker of English) might well pronounce it something
like "ca-shaw", or it _could_ be pronounced that way; I thought of that,
too, when I saw that "-ar" ending; think Jack Kennedy as if he were
living in an uppity part of London.  But would the opposite have been
true (depending on which etymology of several that have come forward is
the right one) - i.e. would a colonist (the, um, polite way to refer to
Brits helping "conquer" the wilds of BC) have made an effort to come up
with a distinctly _English_ way of transcribing a native name (whatever
its source?).  I guess it's possible; perhaps even to that Briton (if
that's who it was) the name actually looked "exotic" in the way that
Nanaimo or Kamloops does; the former comes from Snenemux; I'm not sure
about the latter.  But Jana's right - the usual way to pronounce this in
BC sounds nothing like "kasha", or "kaska" or the other source-words
that have been brought forward.

Given the variety of meanings and origins brought forward, I'm leaning
towards assuming that the "wooly rock" that birds made fireproof nests
out of is a local asbsestos-mining culture mythography; on the other
hand it's the people living there that might have the truest source, and
that the down-country writers were working on second-hand info.
Interesting.  The substance to the Cassiarite claim would be to find out
if there _is_ a special word in a native local language for this "wooly
rock"......

Hmmmmmmm.