It's Thanksgiving So We Asked Brits To Label The United States

[english si]

Plymouth; why it's pronounced [plim-uth] is beyond me

How else would you pronounce it? Ply-mouth? The river is the Plym.

10 - Leeds?

Nope - see Sammi's last

W for fuck's sake just give it back to the Irish already

We did try - they just didn't want to join with the rest of the island in 1922 (and they are one reason why it took so long for home rule to happen - so long that they wanted independence by the 1910s, and then that took a good few years to sort out the least-bad solution), and continue to want to hang on to us. Well more than half do...

We've only stopped their autonomy when they couldn't stop arguing and it had no real rule. They actually have far more devolved than Scotland, and have had it for longer. The Irish rule Northern Ireland. We've wanted shot of it since about 1922, but we respected their right to self determination, where repeatedly a small majority has said "please rule us".

[sammi]

Plymouth; why it's pronounced [plim-uth] is beyond me

How else would you pronounce it? Ply-mouth? The river is the Plym.

Well there's the problem. The etymology was never obvious to me, so I've always pronounced it Ply-mouth (as you said). Like a lot of other names I find rather unusual "Gloucester", "Leicester", etc.

EDIT: Oh, and local ones too. I used to live in the city of Vaughan [vawn], which I used to pronounce [vaw-hun] when we just got here. Never said it again. And a street near the lakeshore is called Strachan [strahn].

English is weird.

[Zeffy]

Well there's the problem. The etymology was never obvious to me, so I've always pronounced it Ply-mouth (as you said). Like a lot of other names I find rather unusual "Gloucester", "Leicester", etc.

English is weird.

I'm not gonna lie, a few months ago I've always known Gloucester as "Gloo-ces-ter" and not "Glaw-ster". Yes, English is weird.

[KEVIN_224]

Plymouth; why it's pronounced [plim-uth] is beyond me

How else would you pronounce it? Ply-mouth? The river is the Plym.

Well there's the problem. The etymology was never obvious to me, so I've always pronounced it Ply-mouth (as you said). Like a lot of other names I find rather unusual "Gloucester", "Leicester", etc.

EDIT: Oh, and local ones too. I used to live in the city of Vaughan [vawn], which I used to pronounce [vaw-hun] when we just got here. Never said it again. And a street near the lakeshore is called Strachan [strahn].

English is weird.

I wonder how many of those Brits got confused with New England?

It must be nice for you Canadians to have a "normal" Thursday like this! I wish we did here!

Connecticut has a ton of British place names, of course! While we don't have Gloucester, we do have Plymouth, to the west of Bristol. I'm in the city of New Britain, yet have never seen an Old Britain. You will see Olde English though!

Our bordering town of Berlin is pro-nounced BER-linn, not ber-LINN like the German city. It irritates me when people say the home city of Yale University as NEW Haven. 

Lastly, if it wasn't for the "Informer" song from Snow of about 1993, I wouldn't be able to pronounce Etobicoke! 

[hotdogPi]

Massachusetts has these towns which are also British town names:

Boston, Cambridge, Ipswich, Gloucester, Plymouth, Leicester, Worcester



As well as Berlin just like Connecticut and New Hampshire do.

[Brandon]

^^ And pronunciations differ across the US and Canada as it is.

shur-LOTT, not SHAR-let (Charlotte).  Southerners say the latter.
Houghton is pronounced "ho-ton".
Grand Rapids kinds gets slurred as "granrapids".
And the Cheeseheads even spell Cheboygan differently as Sheboygan.

Then some areas bastardize names.

Marseilles, IL is pronounced "mar-sales", not like the French city.

Then sometimes we maintain the pronunciation such as in Charlevoix, Mackinac (Mack-in-awe), and even Joliet (as in French before spellings were settled - spelled Joliet, Jolliet, and currently in French as Joliette - all pronounced the same).

[sammi]

It must be nice for you Canadians to have a "normal" Thursday like this! I wish we did here!

Isn't our Thanksgiving a regular day down there? Columbus Day apparently.

Lastly, if it wasn't for the "Informer" song from Snow of about 1993, I wouldn't be able to pronounce Etobicoke! 

I used to pronounce it with the K too, so it always bothered me whenever they wouldn't pronounce it on the news.
But I am a Torontonian now, I even pronounce "Toronto" without the second T. "Tronno".

Ooh, another one. One commercial here says Islamorada [eye-la-morada].

TL;DR English is weird.

[KEVIN_224]

Yes...Columbus Day. I feel it shouldn't even be a holiday, but I digress. 

Toronto is close to Scarborough. I once lived next to Scarborough...Maine (resort town of Old Orchard Beach).

Do people around there ever exclude the ugh part of the city name? Most people in the NFL will say Foxboro when referencing the New England Patriots NFL team. However, when you pass through the town along I-95, the town line sign clearly says "FOXBOROUGH." I've seen people do the same with Westborough, MA.

[hotdogPi]

Do people around there ever exclude the ugh part of the city name? Most people in the NFL will say Foxboro when referencing the New England Patriots NFL team. However, when you pass through the town along I-95, the town line sign clearly says "FOXBOROUGH." I've seen people do the same with Westborough, MA.

And Tyngsboro.

Discussion of this topic should be more appropriate here .

[sammi]

Toronto is close to Scarborough.

Incorrect. Scarborough is within Toronto, and that has been the case since 1998.

[KEVIN_224]

OK. Wasn't aware of that one. Thank you for that! Maybe that city was annexed? My brother has been to Toronto at least (he visited the Skydome for a baseball game in 2004).

Getting back on topic: I couldn't name much in England except for where London is...maybe where the Chunnel portals are and that's it!

[formulanone]

X Scotland
W Northern Ireland
V Isle of Man
U Wales
Y France
8 Hadrian's Wall ?
Q London
G Birmingham

I won't lie, I couldn't place most of your cities on an English Map if my life depended on it.

What's remarkable to me is that after California, Texas, and Florida...it seemed the British were pretty good at spotting the Dakotas (I can't imagine they're well-known travel destinations for those outside the US).

[Road Hog]

I got a good belly laugh at some of the entries. But on the whole, the Brits did pretty well.

[english si]

G Birmingham

No. Everything else right.

Between you so far, you have got 15 out of the 40:
cities (5/20): E, Q, R, S, T
non-England (5/5): U, V, W, X, Y
counties (4/7): 1, 3, 5, 7
tourist (1/8): 8

---

English pronunciation got me when the Jubilee line extension opened - I said (in front of my Cockney grandparents) South-wark, rather than Suv-urk and got funny looks. It was like I had said Green-wich, not Gren-ich.

Not only is there not the phonetic, but we drop letters and squish-together like mad, without changing the spelling.

[mgk920]

OK. Wasn't aware of that one. Thank you for that! Maybe that city was annexed? My brother has been to Toronto at least (he visited the Skydome for a baseball game in 2004).

Getting back on topic: I couldn't name much in England except for where London is...maybe where the Chunnel portals are and that's it!

Yea, the Province of Ontario amalgamated the City of Toronto with five of its suburbs (one of which, North York, was more populous than the pre-merger City of Toronto itself) into the 'NEW and IMPROVED!' City of Toronto in 1998.  It quadrupled the City's population.

Also, at about the same time, they amalgamated the Ottawa region.  Compare a map of the present-day City of Ottawa with one from before that merger.



(Wishing that my home state of Wisconsin had THOSE cajones!!!)

BTW, I would likely be able to correctly place some major cities on the map of the UK, but not the local regions.

Mike

[NE2]

(Wishing that my home state of Wisconsin had THOSE cajones!!!)

Boxes?

[kj3400]

L is Birmingham, H is Manchester(?) G is Leeds (I think)  and A might be Newcastle upon Tyne.

[kurumi]

(Wishing that my home state of Wisconsin had THOSE cajones!!!)

Boxes?

There's only one left and it's near San Diego.

I believe MGK meant to say "conejos"

[english si]

L is Birmingham, H is Manchester(?) G is Leeds (I think)  and A might be Newcastle upon Tyne.

L and A are right, the other two are wrong.

[sammi]

It was like I had said Green-wich, not Gren-ich.

Takes me back to Second Year. There's a pizza chain in the Philippines called Greenwich [green-itch]. Then one time we learned about the Prime Meridian in Greenwich, and the teacher pronounced it [green-witch].

* sammi raises her hand "I think it's pronounced [grin-itch]."

Teacher: No, it's [green-witch]. [green-itch] is the restaurant.

* sammi facepalms

[KEVIN_224]

They should have no problem with Greenwich, Connecticut then! Sure, they'll be surrounded by super rich snobs, but will have an advantage, since the place name came from England to begin with. We people from the Constitution State pronounce it GREN-itch. Imagine the country of Greenland being pronounced as GREN-lend?