March 26, 1990
By Andrew Cassel, Inquirer Staff Writer
BOURBONNAIS, Ill.
They say Dor-AY-do where you’d say Dor-AH-do. That’s over in Decatur, where El Dorado Boulevard is how you get downtown. Don’t speed and don’t snicker.
While in Milan, Ind., or Milan, Mich., you’ll learn that “while in Milan” rhymes. And they’ll thank you not to wrinkle your Eastern nose.
But from New Athens (Ay-thens), Ohio, to Buena (Byoonie) Vista, Iowa, from Versailles (Ver-sales), Ind., to Marseilles (same thing), Ill., the question fairly shouts at a visitor:
If this is the Midwest, cradle of standard American English, home of the neutral accent and heartland of network anchor-speak, how come people who live in these places consistently say them wrong?
It’s enough to drive a linguistic purist to despair. Or to Des Peres, which if you’re in Missouri is the same thing.
A longtime resident of Peru, Ind., leans on his town’s first syllable like a cabbie hitting his horn in traffic. Syrup flows from the lips of Cairo, Ill., natives when they mention their birthplace. To listen to folks in New Madrid (MAD-rid), Mo., the capital of Spain could as well be on Mars.
It’s enough to drive a linguistic purist to despair. Or to Des Peres, which if you’re in Missouri is the same thing.
“There are more foreign place names in the Midwest, for a variety of reasons,” explains Tim Frazer, a linguist who teaches at Western Illinois University in Macomb. “What tends to happen is they become anglicized. They are pronounced the way English words are spelled.”
The pioneers who poured over the Appalachians in the early 19th century found rivers, lakes and settlements already named by French and Spanish predecessors. Said Dennis Preston of Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti: “Literate people would come around and give cities names which were based on European names . . . but then pioneer Americans who learned to read learned just by sounding words out.”
“The guys who laid it out knew how to pronounce it, but they never told anyone,” Preston said.
The newcomers imposed their grammar rules along with everything else, with results that have persisted to this day.
“When people saw an ‘a’ in a word, it was either long ‘ay’ or (short) ‘a.’ If it receives primary stress, it’s a long ‘a,’ “ said Frazer.
That would explain El Dorado. Or Nevada (Ne-VAY-da), Iowa. But not Macomb, which for some reason is pronounced Muh-COAM.
In fact, consistent pronunciation rules may be as scarce on the prairie as good French restaurants. Versailles and Des Plaines, Ill., swing in one phonetic direction, while Lac Court Oreilles, Wis. – “Lucooderay” to its sons and daughters – goes in quite another.
And how do you explain why a shopping street on Chicago’s far North Side, named after the town on Philadelphia’s Main Line, could be spelled Devon but pronounced to rhyme not with heaven, but salon?
“You’ve got me there,” Frazer said.
Here, nestled along the Kankakee River about 65 miles south of Chicago, is what could be the only community in America to have officially split over pronunciation.
Named for a voyageur who once had an Indian trading post here, Bourbonnais was settled in the 1830s by French-Canadians from Quebec. But by the mid-20th century, time and tongue had taken their toll, so that unsuspecting travelers found themselves in a place whose name rhymed more or less with “don’t phone us.”
“That was its name in English – Ber-BONE-us,” said Adrian Richard, a descendant of original settlers who, at 80, serves as unofficial town historian. “Of course when we spoke French at home, we called it Bur-bon-AY.”
But in 1975, in a move that might have bedeviled members of the nationwide “English Only” movement had they known about it, Bourbonnais’ village council members voted to abolish the English pronunciation. They passed a resolution, had it endorsed by the Illinois General Assembly, and added a phonetic guide to road signs welcoming visitors.
“I think it’s been successful,” former Bourbonnais mayor Ernest Mooney, a Democrat, reflected the other day. “There’s still a few old-timers who can’t say Bur-bon-AY, but just about all the young people do.”
That’s not the end of it, however. Bourbonnais Village lies within Bourbonnais Township, and one of those “old-timers” just happens to be township supervisor Larry Power, a Republican.
“They had a bunch of new people come down here, and they didn’t think the pronunciation was right,” Power grumbled. “They didn’t think Ber-BONE-us was dignified enough. Well, I’m not changing the township. It’s been Ber-BONE-us for years and years, it’s still Ber-BONE-us and will be as long as I’m supervisor.”
To academic linguists, that’s no idle threat. “Chances are that fancy pronunciation won’t last long,” said Michigan’s Preston. “All linguistic change comes from the lower classes. Nothing important in a language ever happens because of stuff from above.”
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