The Dalles, Dallesport, Dallas

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When I passed through this area, it was all very confusing to me, but the local residents have no problem distinguishing the three towns.  The Dalles OR and Dallesport WA face each other across the mighty Columbia River, whereas Dallas OR is about 150 miles to the southwest.  I met one young man who was born in Dallas OR, migrated up to Dallesport WA, and crosses the bridge every day to work in The Dalles OR because he doesn't have to pay taxes in OR.  He has absolutely no difficulty differentiating the three towns and seemed surprised when I told him it was hard for me to keep their names straight.

After talking with him (and others) for several minutes, i figured out the secret for keeping the names separate, apart from the spellings.

In their minds, the "The" of "The Dalles" is pronounced with a higher tone and a stronger emphasis than the following two syllables, and you simply must include it — you cannot just call the place "Dalles"; "Dallesport" is one word, with the first two syllables having greater emphasis and higher tones than the final syllable.  And they know well that the name of the third place is pronounced like the megacity in Texas, but has nothing to do with it.

"The Dalles", "Dallesport", "Dallas" — got it?

BTW, the "The" of "The Dalles" is as important and integral to the name as it is for "The Ohio State University".

Oh, and I met a woman here who consistently pronounces "author" as "arthur".

 

Selected readings

 



31 Comments

  1. Y said,

    October 17, 2024 @ 9:45 pm

    I've only heard "Dalles" of "The Dalles" pronounced as one syllable, /dælz/. Wikipedia has it that way as well.

  2. D said,

    October 17, 2024 @ 10:49 pm

    I lived in OR for half a decade and only ever heard /dælz/ as the above reader says.That said, I never spent time in The Dalles itself and know sometimes town names can have local pronunciations (Boise or New Orleans come to mind) that differ from wider pronunciation.

  3. TP said,

    October 17, 2024 @ 10:58 pm

    Also an Indigenous community in northern Ontario …
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dalles_38C

  4. Elliot McIntire said,

    October 18, 2024 @ 12:11 am

    The Dalles — two syllables
    Dallesport — two syllables
    Dallas — two syllables

  5. Philip Taylor said,

    October 18, 2024 @ 2:33 am

    I met a woman here who consistently pronounces "author" as "arthur" — including the potential rhotic /r/ in the middle (/ˈɑːrθ ər/) ?

  6. Jerry Packard said,

    October 18, 2024 @ 7:59 am

    So in essence the residents are using ‘compounding’ (or more accurately, morpheme combination) to solve the near-homophone problem, as Chinese has been doing for hundreds of years.

  7. Robert Coren said,

    October 18, 2024 @ 9:22 am

    There's a roadway in Boston that changes its name several times, but all the names include a definite article, which is never omitted: The Fenway, The Riverway, The Jamaicaway, The Arborway. If I want to talk about the whole collectivity of roads or a section of it (it's not always obvious where the name change occurs) I sometimes just call it "The Way".

    Back in my teen years (that's a very long time ago) I read a novel by Mark Harris called "Bang the Drum Slowly" (actually the second book in a trilogy), in which the narrator is a professional baseball player who, because he also writes books (i.e., the one you're reading), has been nicknamed "Author" by his teammates. His closest friend on the team, a nice but somewhat dim man, has misunderstood this nickname and consistently address the narrator as "Arthur".

  8. Brett said,

    October 18, 2024 @ 12:41 pm

    As Robert Coren no doubt knows, that "The" in the street's names can serve as an actual disambiguator. "The Fenway" is a thoroughfare; "Fenway" is the baseball stadium.

  9. Roscoe said,

    October 18, 2024 @ 1:09 pm

    Who knows how many unwary tourists have ended up in Newark's Penn Station instead of New York's…

  10. Roscoe said,

    October 18, 2024 @ 1:10 pm

    From an old "Family Fortunes" episode:

    HOST: Name a famous Arthur.
    CONTESTANT: Shakespeare.

  11. katarina said,

    October 18, 2024 @ 1:45 pm

    One of the biggest confusions – and disappointments – I’ve ever experienced was when I confused Vancouver WA with Vancouver BC. Our small Chinese freighter, with captain and crew Chinese who knew hardly any English, and about ten student passengers, finally after weeks in the stormy wintry Pacific arrived in America by sailing up the majestic Columbia River. Our first stop was Longview WA, The second was Vancouver. We all thought this was the big city Vancouver we’d all heard about. It was already night, about 8 o’clock, and we were excited to go ashore. To our great surprise and disappointment we didn’t see any signs of a great city. It was a little town(then), all closed for the night. We walked on what appeared to be Main Street and everything was small and small-town, the little shops and so on, all shut. No sign of life anywhere. I thought perhaps we were only on the edge of a great city, but still, how come the harbor had no big building and seemed deserted? We returned to our boat crestfallen. Only later did I learn that there was another Vancouver. Years later, I witnessed the same level of disappointment in a young Chinese woman I met in Lansing, Michigan. I learned that she was delighted that her husband was now studying at Michigan University— mee-shee-gin in Mandarin. In those days we in China only heard about Hafu, Yehlu, Gelwinbeeya, Poolingssdwin, and Meesheegin. During our conversation she learned that she and her husband were at Michigan State University, not at U. of Michigan, the Meesheegin of Chinese fame. She was flabbergasted. It was awful.

  12. SlideSF said,

    October 18, 2024 @ 1:47 pm

    When I lived in Portland, everyone I knew pronounced it like The Dalls. Two one-syllable words. I never heard a different pronunciation. It was a little jarring to me, from Wisconsin, where one of the major tourist towns of Wisconsin Dells is always referred to as The Dells. It sounded like they had a strange Oregonian accent.
    We also have a town, just outside Madison called Oregon, Wisconsin. It is pronounced with a strong accent on the final syllable, which rhymes with Don. If you pronounce the name of the State of Oregon that way, you will be sneered at as a Californian, or worse.

  13. Victor Mair said,

    October 18, 2024 @ 2:31 pm

    @SlideSF

    I was just about to make the following comment before I read your note. In fact, I had already completed my comment before I read yours.

    =====

    After hearing the local people here in The Dalles quite naturally pronounce the name of their town as The Dells dozens of times during the last couple of days, I couldn't help but think of the Wisconsin Dells, a popular tourist spot about forty miles northwest of Madison. Looking into the origin of the name Dells in Wisconsin, I found this in Wikipedia:

    ===

    The natural formation of the Dells was named by Early French explorers as dalles, a rapids or narrows on a river in voyageur French. Wisconsin Dells is located on ancestral Ho-Chunk and Menominee land. The Ho-Chunk name for Wisconsin Dells is Nįįš hakiisųc, meaning "rocks close together"

    ===

    That was mind-boggling to me because this morning I had heard a clerk at the front desk of the inn where I'm staying say that Dalles means "rapids", and she thought it came from French!

    After I made the connection between The Dalles in Oregon and Wisconsin Dells, I went back down and told her about the latter, and she was stunned, because she had never heard of the Wicsonsin Dells. She said she wanted to look it up and asked me how to spell the name. When I told her that it was "Dells", she said, "That would make a not more sense." We both had a good laugh over that, and she told me that people from out of state are constantly asking her how to pronounce The Dalles.

  14. David Marjanović said,

    October 19, 2024 @ 5:54 am

    she told me that people from out of state are constantly asking her how to pronounce The Dalles

    That stuns me. I'd have immediately gone for /ðəˈdælz/ – do native speakers assume it can't be that easy?

  15. Victor Mair said,

    October 19, 2024 @ 8:24 am

    Your reaction stuns me. It's a fact of life that the local people here are constantly being asked how to pronounce the name of their town

  16. Philip Taylor said,

    October 19, 2024 @ 9:58 am

    David — "native speakers" may well remember John Foster Dulles, whose surname was bi-syllabic (/ˌdʒɒn ˌfɒstə ˈdʌlɪs/), so may be uncertain as to whether "Dalles" takes one syllable or two …;

  17. Victor Mair said,

    October 20, 2024 @ 8:58 am

    Yesterday around noon, I wanted to see what it was like in Dallesport, so I ran across The Dalles Columbia Bridge. As I was running along the road to Dallesport, I noticed a helicopter pass by overhead and land somewhere to the northwest.

    I kept running on the road to Dallesport, along the bluffs overlooking the Columbia and viewing majestic Mount Hood in the distance (about sixty miles to the SSW) but seeming not far, looking like an ice cream cone, with a cute halo-like circle of clouds sitting on top of the peak.

    After about half an hour, a truck approached me on the road, coming from Dallesport. I flagged it down and saw that on side of the truck it said that it was from a helicopter company.

    I asked the two men inside, "Were you flying the helicopter that passed by a while ago.?" They said yes, they were, and told me that their company worked on contract for the forestry service to spot fires. I asked them where they landed the helicopter, and they said, "Dālsport".

    I replied, "Around here, the people say, "Delsport".

    The man sitting next to the window on my side said, and it blew me away, "Dālsport, Delsport — whatever."

    They knew enough "local" to realize that, regardless of the sound of the vowel, "Dalles" is one syllable

  18. Victor Mair said,

    October 20, 2024 @ 9:14 am

    The Dalles

    ——

    The Dells

    the falls

    the rapids

    the glen

    the cliff(s)

    the woods

    the slope

    the cascade

    etc., etc.

    Above and below the dashed line, what's the prosodic difference?

  19. RfP said,

    October 20, 2024 @ 11:47 am

    @Victor

    I beg you to forgive my first reaction to your latest comment, which was "I can't believe he's using 'prosodic' as a synonym for 'f*cking'!" (Which made sense to me at the time, but might be completely mystifying to many…)

    But my reaction stemmed in part from not being at all clear where you're going with this.

    As far as I can tell, "The Dalles" has a lot more in common prosodically with "The Dells" and "the falls" than any of these three items has with anything in the rest of the list.

    Or am I missing something?

    For example, is "The" highly stressed in "The Dalles" and I've just never noticed that?

  20. Victor Mair said,

    October 20, 2024 @ 12:38 pm

    Yes, you never noticed it.

    By demonstration, I've been told repeatedly by local speakers in The Dalles that "The" is higher and stressed, while "Dalles" is lower and unstressed.

    I cannot comprehend your first paragraph, which comes across as incoherent.

  21. RfP said,

    October 20, 2024 @ 3:02 pm

    Thanks, Victor.

    And my apologies for the inept—if I can even dignify it as ineptitude—beginning of my comment.

  22. Robert Coren said,

    October 20, 2024 @ 7:00 pm

    @Brett: True, but there's no local context in which you can say "Riverway" or "Jamaicaway" and have it be the correct designation for anything.

  23. Scott P. said,

    October 21, 2024 @ 7:42 am

    @Brett: True, but there's no local context in which you can say "Riverway" or "Jamaicaway" and have it be the correct designation for anything.

    Surely you would say "The Riverway Bandit" and not "The The Riverway Bandit"? In the first construction, the article goes with the noun, not the adjective.

  24. BZ said,

    October 21, 2024 @ 3:16 pm

    How common is a "the" as part of a municipality? Up until this past summer, I only knew about "The Bronx", but we spent our summer vacation in a tiny place in the Poconos called "The Hideout". It's only a private gated community, but Wikipedia calls it a "census designated place", and sure enough, the addresses inside it are "The Hideout, PA", though for postal deliveries it's Lake Ariel.

  25. Robert Coren said,

    October 22, 2024 @ 9:03 am

    @Scott P.: OK, "no local context" might have been a little over-broad.

    I note that "the Fenway" (I think I'm right in not capitalizing the article here) is also the designation of a neighborhood, so there's a difference between saying that one lives "on The Fenway" and "in the Fenway". (Fenway Park, by the way, is not on The Fenway; it's even a bit of a stretch to say that it's in the Fenway, since it's on the other side of the Back Bay Fens.)

  26. Misha Schutt said,

    October 22, 2024 @ 10:19 am

    And I happen to live in a century-old apartment building in Los Angeles that calls itself The Fenway. I have no idea of the history behind its name–maybe it's buried in the application for designation as a historic building.

  27. RfP said,

    October 23, 2024 @ 5:23 am

    @BZ

    Several San Francisco neighborhoods are referred to as, for example, the Richmond, the Sunset, the Inner Sunset, the Outer Sunset, the Mission, the Western Addition, The Embarcadero, or the Castro. As opposed to, say, Bernal Heights, Pacific Heights, Laurel Heights, Presidio Heights, Twin Peaks, Russian Hill, Telegraph Hill, or Nob Hill.

    However, the "t" in "the" isn't normally capitalized, as I recall, and you would never use these designations in addressing an envelope. They're all part of San Francisco.

    I believe the Richmond was originally known as "the Richmond district," and that's probably true for the others.

    And I'm also noticing that the neighborhoods that come to mind immediately that don't use "the" (as noted above) are all hilly in some way. Or, as in Cole Valley, Mission Bay and China Basin, they include some other sort of geophysical feature as part of their name.

  28. RfP said,

    October 23, 2024 @ 5:30 am

    Thinking further about this, I wonder whether "the Embarcadero," "the Marina" and "the Mission" were originally borrowed from Spanish and retained their article in the process.

    And if so, whether that influenced the naming of other neighborhoods.

  29. SYD said,

    October 23, 2024 @ 11:29 am

    Their unique pronunciation habits are like hidden linguistic markers, helping to ground and clarify these distinct locations, despite their close proximity. It’s a reminder of how language evolves regionally and becomes an integral part of identity.

  30. David Marjanović said,

    October 23, 2024 @ 3:54 pm

    John Foster Dulles, whose surname was bi-syllabic (/ˌdʒɒn ˌfɒstə ˈdʌlɪs/)

    Ah, I didn't know that. Now everything makes sense, thank you!

  31. maidhc said,

    October 23, 2024 @ 5:16 pm

    Here's another SF Bay Area example. There's a street that runs between Santa Clara and San Jose called The Alameda. According to a local history, "alameda" means "poplar grove", "shady walk", "wood" or "public walk" in Spanish as spoken in 18th century California. The street, completed in 1799, was originally lined with willow trees (not poplars). The street was built with Mission labor, to encourage the inhabitants of the Pueblo of San Jose to attend Mass at Mission Santa Clara. Before that, there was no direct route.

    There is also a city called Alameda, adjacent to Oakland. The name appears to go back to a settlement existing around 1850 or so. The city is on some islands including Alameda Island.

    The city of Alameda is located in Alameda County, created in 1853, and named after a tree-lined creek (willows and sycamores) called Arroyo de la Alameda, but now known as Alameda Creek.

    It appears that from the earliest records on, the street was always The Alameda and the town was Alameda, and there was never any confusion about this.

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