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Comment by narag | Hacker News Reader

That's not an English name. It's the name of a spanish river. Wad is river in Arabic. They pronounce it correctly. It's common that foreign words are adopted and adapted to the host language, but sometimes, specially if they're names, the original pronounciation lingers.

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aaand that reminds me of "Torpenhow Hill".

> When the Saxons arrived and asked the Welsh the name of that hill, the Welsh said “pen” which means "hill" in Welsh. So the Saxons used their word for hill, “tor,” and called it Torpen (hill hill). > > Then the Norse arrived and the same process added the their world for hill “Haugr”. So now it was Torpen Haugr (Hill Hill Hill). > > Later, the English called it Torpenhow Hill (Hill Hill Hill Hill)

Turns out the rise near the village of Torpenhow isn't named Torpenhow Hill, but I digress... Here's a quick YT on it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUyXiiIGDTo

This is a fun hoax that was invented 70 years ago, in 1953. It was debunked at least 20 years ago, but it's still more popular than facts.

There is a Tarpenhow place in the UK, but it has no hill. So Tarpenhow hill does not exist. No mention of Norse either in the Oxford Concise Dictionary which describes the word as "Torr pen", top of the hill, from the Welsh "pen", and Old English "hoh", ridge.

I really enjoyed that, so will you kindly cease and desist from ruining a wonderful story with facts.

How am I supposed to delight my friends by telling the tale of the Hill Hill Hill Hill if people insist on ruining it by correcting me?

I don't see any contradiction between saying something comes from "old english" and saying it comes from norse.

Old English was mostly Anglo-Saxon. Old Norse was mixed in later, and after the Norman invasion it became Middle English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English Also, read this interesting theory: https://partner.sciencenorway.no/forskningno-history-languag...

> There is a Tarpenhow place in the UK, but it has no hill

> Oxford Concise Dictionary which describes the word as "Torr pen", top of the hill

Are you and the dictionary authors, respectively, sure? :)

there's a 3x hill name in Pilton, uk/ on the site of Glastonbury festival

"You see, in Welsh (Romano-British), PEN means hill. In a slightly different version of Gaelic (more common in Ireland and Scotland), ARD means hill. So, Pennard Hill is "Hill Hill Hill". For generation after generation, newcomers to the region have been referred to "that hill over there" - and completely failed to understand. A few more millennia, and the name may be longer than the hill. "

from https://www.strum.co.uk/twilight/pennard.htm

My favourite example of this sort of redundancy is the fact that there are numerous rivers in England called the River Avon. Avon is believed to come from the Proto-Brythonic word "aβon" [0], meaning "river".

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Brythoni...

San Francisco is famously a hodgepodge of Spanish-looking names with canonical hybrid pronunciations.

- Divisadero: duh viz uh derro

- Arguello: are goo-ell o

- San Rafael: san ruff ell

- Tomales: tuh mal es

- Gough: gawff (not Spanish, but still surprising)

Gough is pronounced like cough. Not that surprising, just a very old way of spelling

I did not know it was a river in Spain, coming from the US I had always assumed it was some catholic religious phrase or a mispronunciation of a native word.

It makes me cringe to imagine people saying "GWAD-uh-LOOP" but I guess its not even that bad compared to many mispronunciations

I think it is not uncommon in the US for place names to take on a local pronunciation. It seems to become part of the local identity. For instance, Cairo (kay-roh) Illinois. The locals know how it is pronounced when referring to the city in Egypt, but they will correct you if you pronounce the name of their town that way.

> It makes me cringe to imagine people saying "GWAD-uh-LOOP"

What's the better/closer-to-original pronunciation?

I have always heard "GWAD-uh-LOOP-eh" or "GWAD-uh-LOOP-ay" around where I live but native spanish speakers elsewhere on this thread have said that "GWAD-uh-LOOP" is not that bad of a pronunciation so I imagine it is a highly regional thing.

It's a river, a town, a religious icon, a name in Spain and then, when conquistadores from the area went to Mexico, they named another town, another icon... Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe is the patron saint of Mexico, so it's a big thing there.

That pronunciation is not so bad. Source: I'm a native Spanish speaker and dated a Guadalupe for years :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guadalupe_(name)

I think that's their point. I think the proper (Spanish) pronunciation is gwah-dah-loo-peh.

Isn't that the same? I mean for a native English speaker. Both seem good aproximations (from a native Spanish speaker pov).

Loop vs Lu-peh. One has two syllables on the ending and the other has one. Surely that sounds noticeable different.

Not saying it's right or wrong, but the two are different.

I notice English speakers have a tendency to assume final e's are silent.

There's a good reason for that: in English, a trailing e tends to be silent, but also to indicate that the previous vowel is different (long vs. short usually).

So, to an English speaker, "lupe" looks like LOOP, which is different from "lup" which would be LUPP. Those aren't real words of course, so some similar words with this effect might be "flute", "lute", and "glute". "flut" and "lut" aren't words AFAIK (but "flutter" is), but "glut" definitely is, and has the short-u vowel sound as opposed to the long-u that "glute" has.

The pronunciation rules in English aren't very good and are full of exceptions, but speakers are still just trying to apply the rules they know, based on other words they know, to foreign names.

That's the correct pronunciation, yup

right.

And funny that I once ordered a sandwich in mexico, but they couldn't understand me until I pronounced it like san-doo-weee-ch

There is an island in the French carribean called "Guadeloupe" which is pronunced the same. Don't know if these are related too.

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