Page:The American Language.djvu/314

298 is usually pronounced Ann 'ran'l by its people. Arkansas, as everyone knows, is pronounced Arkansaw by the Arkansans, and the Nevadans give the name of their state a flat a. The local pronunciation of Illinois I have already noticed. Iowa, at home, is often loway. Many American geographical names offer great difficulty to Englishmen. One of my English ac- quaintances tells me that he was taught at school to accent Massachusetts on the second syllable, to rhyme the second sylla- ble of Ohio with tea, and to sound the first c in Connecticut. In Maryland the name of Calvert county is given a broad a, whereas the name of Calvert street, in Baltimore, has a flat a. This curious distinction is almost always kept up. A Scotchman, coming to America, would give the ch in such names as Loch Raven and Lochvale the guttural Scotch (and German) sound, but locally it is always pronounced as if it were k.

Finally, there is a curious difference between English and American usage in the use of the word river. The English in- variably put it before the proper name, whereas we almost as invariably put it after. The Thames river would seem quite as strange to an Englishman as the river Chicago would seem to us. This difference arose more than a century ago and was noticed by Pickering. But in his day the American usage was still somewhat uncertain, and such forms as the river Mississippi were yet in use. Today river almost always goes after the proper name.

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Street Names—"Such a locality as 'the corner of Avenue H and Twenty-third street,' " says W. W. Crane, "is about as distinctively American as Algonquin and Iroquois names like Mississippi and Saratoga." Kipling, in his "American Notes," gives testimony to the strangeness with which the