LanguageHat links to a Wikipedia list of names with non-intuitive pronunciation.
Having embarassed myself in the past with transliterating Ree-ding for the city of Reading, and Edin-boorg for Edinburgh, I learned my lesson.
My trick (well, once I’ve identified that there’s some sort of “danger” with the name, because Reading, for example, seems very innocent) is to google the pronunciation. I assume that if a name has a non-intuitive pronunciation, it would appear with its pronunciation in parenthesis. So for Reading, I would search: “reading pronounced” (with the quotes, which lock the two words together), and get: Reading (pronounced Red-ding).
Try it, it’ll save you from mistakes with Reading and Edinburgh, which, interestingly enough, don’t appear on the Wiki list. I wonder, are they perhaps non-intuitive to me, as a Hebrew speaker, but more intuitive to native English speakers? or is it because these cities are very well-known, that they are not listed?
You have “with the parentheses” when you mean “with the quotes”.
The pronunciations of Reading and Edinburgh are not intuitive as far as I’m concerned, as a native US English speaker. I certainly pronounced “Reading” like “reading” when I first encountered it as a child (in the name of the Reading Railroad in the game Monopoly).
Comment by KCinDC — August 24, 2007 @ 8:24 pm