Car Bin?

Every locale's population has their own ways of refering to itself, be they Sydneysiders, Novocastrians or Melbournians. Yet it should be fairly self evident how the city or place name itself should be pronounced, one would think. After all, in English at least, there is an agreed upon way to pronounce the given syllables in a word, accents and inflections aside. One would think that when given a particular word with a given, agreed upon way to pronounce the syllables within that word, there would be no deviations from that given way of pronouncing it, right?

It takes a whole heck of a lot to keep myself from snickering when I hear a local pronouncing the name of the capital of this province, Toronto. You see, I pronounce it "toe-RON-toe", but whenever I hear a Canadian pronounce it, I seem to hear it as this:

My dear Ontarians, this is the image I get in my head when you refer to "toe-RAH-nah". That's a Holden Torana, a car synonymous with the late 70s and what we like to call hoons. These cars are done up to the nines, lowered, given mag wheels and "hotted up", and are often clocked going waaaay too fast in residential areas.

I know it's my comprehension of Canadian tones that affect how I hear the word, but I still can't help but giggle when people refer to living in what I hear as "toe-RAH-nah". Even the newsreaders seem to pronounce it this way!

How many Canadians can fit in a Holden car? 5,555,912 according to the last census. Ba-DOOM tish!

Australians aren't like this, obviously. We don't have any kind of weirdness like that, right? We call a spade a spade and there's no confusion in how we pronounce our city names!

Drat, foiled again by my own hubris.

One of the things I always cringe at when I hear non-Australians talking about my home city is the way so many of them tend to elongate the second syllable, making it "mel-BOOOOORN". Some of them even manage to pronounce the "e" on the end of it. One of the things I liked about The Husband before we got together was that he assimilated to saying "mel-BIN" very quickly, despite how it's actually spelled.

Sorry Canadians, but I don't think I can pronounce "Toronto" the way you guys do. So I'll make you a deal - I'll not wince when you refer to Melbourne if you don't make fun of me and my foreign interpretation of Toronto, ok? I am not sure I can promise not to titter at "toe-RAH-nah" every time, though. I'm only human, after all.