Iago, Mary-Land and schwa

[hickling@xxxxxxxx (Lee Hickling)]

   Hey, we're way off topic here, but I can't tell you how relieved I am
to find a thread that I understand, being a XY4WIN user who hasn't yet
ventured into XPL, but a trained linguist and failed poet.
   Of course Iago rhymes with Chicago. It is pronounced ee-AH-go, and
there is no other accepted pronunciation on either side of the Atlantic.
   Chaos can rhyme with boss. In fact, this is the more highfalutin
pronunciation, and tends to be used by people who pronounce the H in herb,
which is also correct and also can raise eyebrows.
   Maryland/fairyland was the pronunciation used back when the state was a
colony, and can still be heard occasionally here in Merry-Land. The Roman
Catholic Calverts, of course, named the colony in honor of the Blessed
Virgin, but slipped the name past adherents of the C of E or some more
protestant form of Christianity by letting it be supposed that it was named
for an English queen, Henrietta Maria. No one was fooled.
   Pretty thin, though, huh? It should have been called Henriettaland if
that were true.
   The prevailing modern pronunciation MARE-uh-lund displays the way
strongly accented languages like English tend to relax the vowels in
unaccented syllables into the sound linguists call schwa, pronounced uh.
It's a trait that we share with speakers of Russian.
   Our only large city Baltimore, by the way, is pronounced BAWL-uh-m'r,
with a faint glottal stop substituted for the T. The American League
baseball team there is the Oreos.
   Have a nice day, hon.



Lee Hickling            
hickling@xxxxxxxx