English Language & Usage Asked on July 17, 2021
I know there was a long debate about whether "Los Angeles" should be pronounced like the English (soft-G, as in "jelly") or the Spanish (heavy-H as in "Jose"), and given the history of the city, that division seems quite natural and inevitable.
The English version eventually won, and except among Spanish speakers it is now the standard pronunciation.
There was once heated debate over how to pronounce “Los Angeles.” The Spanish pronunciation of the name has long been “Loce AHN-heh-less.” Yet, non-Spanish speaking Angelenos seemed to prefer the harder-sounding anglicized version “Loss ANN-ju-less.” The anglicized version was adopted, in 1934, by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names.
— Pronouncing Los Angeles
In many films from the 1940s and 1950s though, the city’s name is frequently pronounced a third way, with a hard-G (as in "gelding" or "Geller").
But I can’t find any reason for this pronunciation, with the hard-G, so when and why did the hard-G version originate, and when and why did it disappear?
According to this 1953 article by David Allen Stein, the pronunciation since the 1850 incorporation had been the one with soft G, and the hard-G variant was a pseudo-Spanish pronunciation that grew out of a "craze" around the turn of the century "to give every new street, every new subdivision, every new town a 'Spanish' name ... not limited to Southern California but spread over the state." If this is correct, the hard-G variant may be a sort of hyperforeignism on the assumption that that was closer to Spanish [ˈaŋxeles] (or whatever the Spanish pronunciation was thought to be).
This is given credence by this letter sent to a newspaper by Charles Fletcher Lummis, an LA librarian who vigorously advocated for the hard-G pronunciation:
Spanish G before E has no precise equivalent in English. It is almost exactly the German ch in "buch." Those who call the name "Ann Hell" are less outlandish than the "angle" people; but they are still far from the fact.
So even though he was well aware that [ɡ] wasn't a good approximation to [x], he advocated for it anyway because it was at least closer than [dʒ].
The hard-G pronunciation soon lost favor, with endorsements of the soft G coming from the US Board on Geographic Names in 1934, and from the city of Los Angeles itself in 1952, as documented in this LA Times story. Again assuming Stein is correct, this was a return to an old form.
To address your question more directly, I think Stein and Lummis's accounts imply the hard-G pronunciation arose from an earlier, more faithful attempt at approximating Spanish, and [ɡ] was inserted as a result of epenthesis. Here's what I think happened:
Correct answer by Nardog on July 17, 2021
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