Stop! You're Both Right

Cyberspace has certainly shrunk the margin of error ... Colloquialisms used to take quite a while to become embedded in a local vernacular. For example, the Americans expunged the British from the colonies in 1789, but based upon personal letters exchanged between the two countries which have been noted by historians, it took until the 1830s before comments were made noticing a distinct difference in accents between them. Local dialects will always be a fixture in geographical cultures. However, as more and more of us traverse both cyberspace and the real world, basic pronunciations are becoming a bit of an issue. I just noticed this again in the world of sport, when a national broadcast featured the recent darlings of NCAA basketball, Gonzaga University from Spokane, Washington. The locals there insist that the name be stated as 'Gon-ZAEG-ah,' but inevitably, sports announcers from elsewhere defer to 'Gon-ZAHG-uh' until corrected by the locals. However, the Gonzaga name has been a part of Italian history since the 1300s, and anyone who has studied it or been exposed to it from that much deeper context knows that the correct pronunciation is 'Gon-ZAHG-uh.' Ludovico Gonzaga not only established his family's dynasty over the Italian state of Mantua in 1328, but his family became a cultural and military force in that area for the better part of five centuries. You'll even note that the Spokane university has an extension program in Italy and still steadfastly maintains its preference for the colloquial pronunciation. Trust me, in Europe, it's called 'Gon-ZAHG-uh.' However, alumni from the Spokane campus, from Bing Crosby to John Stockton, learned to refer to their alma mater as 'Gon-ZAEG-ah.' This raises the age-old question of proper pronunciation etiquette, of course. Do we go with the traditional and accurate version of a proper name if we are aware of it or with the colloquial preferences which, for some reason, took hold in a certain area? Another classic example is N