A better pronunciation of "Davos"
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From M. Paul Shore (of partial Swiss German ancestry; former Linguistics major) to PBS News staff:
I realize this email may arrive too late, but is there any hope that, for this year's World Economic Forum season, the PBS News Hour might be able to start pronouncing the name of the town where that meeting is held in a reasonably close English-language approximation? (In other words you don't have to put on a dirndls-and-lederhosen accent to say it, even if many of your journalists insist on doing the equivalent for Spanish.) For decades, broadcast news media in the Anglosphere have been pronouncing it "DA-vōs", as if a town in eastern Switzerland had, for no identifiable reason, been slapped with a Greek name (like Kavos or Stavros). In fact, though the name "Davos" was ultimately derived from southern-Swiss Romance dialects centuries ago, its pronunciation (along with its spelling) has become fairly Germanicized: in Standard German it's pronounced "da-FŌS" (or, sometimes, "da-VŌS"), with variants in the Swiss German language (Schwiizerdütsch, which is not to be confused with the Swiss variety of Standard German) that include "Tafaas" and "Tafaa" (stress on the second syllable).
I'm sure that some people's reaction to this will be "everybody in the Anglosphere says 'DA-vōs', it's hopeless to try to diverge from that". I disagree. It wasn't that long ago that English-speakers routinely pronounced "Chile" as "chilly": did that mean PBS was obligated to say "chilly" forever? In a PBS-world where reverence for the Spanish language is so extreme that to not flip the "r" in "Maduro" and not de-aspirate the "t" in "Latino" practically count as racist hate-crimes, I think we can do better for the Swiss town of Davos.
Addendum (also from M. Paul Shore)
For whatever light this may shed on the evolution of the name "Davos" here's another Swiss pronunciation, which neither the English nor the German nor the Alemannic Wikipedia article acknowledges: "da-FAU", spoken at 0:14 and (indirectly) 0:42 of the following short video by an energetic young promoter of Walser culture and the Prättigau region (which latter she's careful to explain is near Davos but doesn't actually include it): https://www.youtube.com/shorts/CIX2pDRFxyc Note the second-syllable similarity to the Romansh Tavau.
The town name is claimed to derive from Latin tubus allegedly meaning "ravine", although I don't see any acknowledgement of such a meaning in the Oxford Latin Dictionary 1996 corrected First Edition, which is the edition I happen to have lying around. Clearly the stress shifted at some point from the first syllable to the second, and the "b" became a "v" and then, in some places, a spoken "f". Which all raises the question, how similar is the unfortunate pronunciation "DA-vōs" to the most recent non-Germanic antecedent of the name? Hopefully the stubborn advocates of "DA-vōs", to the extent there are any, wouldn't be astute enough to figure that out and then say "Well, we're just saying the original version of the name"—but you never know.
Selected readings
- "Colossal translation fail at the Boao Forum for Asia" (4/13/18)
- "Thought Leadership" (2/12/17)
M. Paul Shore said,
January 19, 2026 @ 5:01 pm
And I should’ve said, in the second sentence of the last paragraph, “If that’s true, then clearly the stress shifted [. . .]”.
Philip Taylor said,
January 19, 2026 @ 5:14 pm
Well, I have learned two from this thread (at least) —
1) That the BBC have been misleading me for some time as to how Davos should be pronounced; and
2) That "Schweizerdeutsch" should actually be spelled "Schwiizerdütsch".
Thank you MPS.
Philip Taylor said,
January 19, 2026 @ 5:17 pm
But sadly I have still not learned to check that my HTML elemens are properly closed … (which doesn't, however, explain how I also omitted "things" after the intended-to-be-italicised "two"
M. Paul Shore said,
January 19, 2026 @ 6:16 pm
Philip Taylor: Schweizerdeutsch is in fact the normal name of that language in Standard German. Within the Swiss German language itself, there are multiple possible versions: Schwizerdütsch, Schwiizerdütsch, Schwyzerdütsch, Schwiizertüütsch, Schwyzertütsch, Schwyzertüütsch, Schwizertitsch, and perhaps others. It's a fascinating and quite variegated language (or section of the Continental West Germanic dialect continuum, or whatever you want to consider it); there's a surprisingly large amount of material about it on line.
Lucas Christopoulos said,
January 19, 2026 @ 6:31 pm
Davos is a beautiful place. I spent three months there with the Chinese Ski Team. It has a hot spring, and even Prince Charles III has a high-tech private chalet there with an attached bunker. Davos is part of the Swiss canton of Grisons/Graubünden, where one of Switzerland’s four national languages, rumantsch/Romansh, is also spoken. There are three mountain valleys in the region, each with its own variant of the dialect.
“In per tuts, tuts per in.”
Lucas Christopoulos said,
January 19, 2026 @ 6:44 pm
Davos: Romansh word “tavau” or “tabau”, which means something like “meadow” or “flat place”. Over time, this evolved into the Germanized Davos we use today.
Allen Thrasher said,
January 19, 2026 @ 7:20 pm
I checked for _tubus_ in Niermeyer's Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon Minus, and it does not appear therein at all, nor, consequently, have a meaning 'ravine.'
J.W. Brewer said,
January 19, 2026 @ 7:58 pm
The wikipedia article on the place starts out with an explicit pronunciation explanation. "Davos (UK: /ˈdævɒs, dɑːˈvɒs/, US: /dɑːˈvoʊs/; German: [daˈfoːs] or [daˈvoːs]." My own advice to PBS would be that if they're still broadcasting in AmEng they should use the AmEng pronunciation, although if they start broadcasting in Standard German they should instead use the Standard German pronunciation. If they start broadcasting in Swiss German, then etc.
If they for some reason want to deviate from AmEng to appear "authentic" they should obviously use the Romansh toponym, with whatever adjustments may be necessary to AmEng phonology. Romansh wikipedia has an audio clip you can click on to hear the name said aloud, although I make no promises as to whether that's in the most appropriate Romansh dialect. https://rm.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tavau
A good example of a more sizable Swiss municipality where English declines to follow either the spelling or the pronunciation of the German name would be Lucerne. There is speculation there about a Latinate etymology, but it strikes me as speculative enough you can't really get behind the German.
M. Paul Shore said,
January 19, 2026 @ 8:06 pm
Lucas Christopoulos: With all due respect for your personal experience of the town, I have to admit to some skepticism regarding your etymological suggestion. I gather you're arguing that the name fundamentally means "table" and therefore "flatland", so that it's a reflex of Latin tabula. But if that's the case why are Romansh Tavau "Davos" and tabau "table" not identical? And if we accept their not being identical, why is the town name not the more phonetically archaic form, as one tends to expect of toponyms? Similarly, why are the Italian Tavate "Davos" and tavola "table" not identical? Also, where would the final "s" (first attested in a 13th-century document calling the town "Tavaus") have come from?
M. Paul Shore said,
January 19, 2026 @ 8:27 pm
Allen Thrasher: The OLD shows the meanings "trumpet", "pipe/tube", and "a tubular passage in the body", with citations for each. But again, no "ravine".
Lucas Christopoulos said,
January 20, 2026 @ 2:10 am
The village of Davos is first mentioned in 1213 as Tavaus (Romansh speaking village). From about 1280 the barons of Vaz allowed German-speaking Walser colonists to settle.
Leonard Bick said,
January 20, 2026 @ 9:15 am
I don't say "Paree," I say Paris. I don't say "Roma," I say "Rome." Because I speak English, not French or Italian. And for decades, the English pronunciation of Davos has been DA-vōs, not da-FŌS. I know we used to call Livorno "Leghorn," although never in my day, so reform is possible. But I won't be the one to start.
languagehat said,
January 20, 2026 @ 9:39 am
And for decades, the English pronunciation of Davos has been DA-vōs, not da-FŌS.
English, not American. See JWB's excellent comment above.
JJM said,
January 20, 2026 @ 10:41 am
Leonard Blick: well said.
JJM said,
January 20, 2026 @ 10:42 am
Oops! Make that "Bick".
Very sorry!
Philip Taylor said,
January 20, 2026 @ 11:37 am
I sit uneasily in both camps — like Leonard, I say /ˈpær ɪs/ and /rəʊm/, but I also say Vlissingen (not "Flushing") and "Nürnberg ", not "Nuremberg". Extrapolating from that small sample, it looks to me as if I continue to use the pronunciations that I learned as a child, but once I became an adult I made a conscious effort to learn (and use) the "native" pronunciation for foreign place names rather than the British, whence "Warszawa", etc. Unfortunately the BBC has so drilled /dævɔs/ into me that I think it highly unlikely I will ever attempt the correct pronunciation …
ajay said,
January 20, 2026 @ 12:24 pm
It wasn't that long ago that English-speakers routinely pronounced "Chile" as "chilly": did that mean PBS was obligated to say "chilly" forever?
Indeed, in BrE "Chile", "chilly" and "chilli" are still all homophones.
I note, of course, that Swiss broadcasters do not follow Paul Shore's advice. "Prag" is the capital of Czechia to them, "Rom" is the capital of Italy, "Warschau" the capital of Poland and so on.
Interestingly, how you pronounce (and indeed spell) "Basel/Basle" in English varies from industry to industry in my experience. In finance it is "Basel" (and it's mentioned a lot because of the Basel Regulations on Capital Adequacy), but in aviation it is "Basle" pronounced to rhyme with "pal".
Maybe the city of Basel is in a German-speaking bit but Basle Airport is in a French-speaking bit?
katarina said,
January 20, 2026 @ 1:00 pm
Thank you Mr.. Shore, but I agree with Mr. Bick.
If we were to pronounce like the natives/locals
Shanghai would be Zonghay (like in English, ditto below)
Hong Kong would be Hay-erng-gong
Hunan would be Funan
Sichuan would be Ss-tsuan
Cantonese would be Gongdongese.
(BTW, I say chilly for Chile, and Sow Pawlo instead of Sahng Pawloo for São Paulo.)
Hans Adler said,
January 20, 2026 @ 1:08 pm
I think there is a continuum of pronunciations and even different names for foreign place names, ranging from legitimate alternative, though etymologically related, names like French Aix-la-Chappelle for the German city of Aachen (or Londres for London), to bad ad hoc guesses at how a foreign name is pronounced.
At one end it's linguistic divergence that developed over many centuries. It's no more wrong than the English pronunciations of English words of (Norman) French origin. At the other end it's clearly wrong and may well lead to communication difficulties if the guess is too idiosyncratic.
For Davos I would normally expect an English pronunciation that presses the German pronunciation into English phonetics. At the very minimum that means putting the stress on the second syllable as in the UK pronunciation listed in Wiktionary. Since Davos used to be a very important holiday destination for British people, this makes perfect sense.
The American English pronunciation seems to have started with incorrect guessing by people who have never been in Davos, and never talked about it with Brits. There are basically two ways to deal with this: Accept that this is yet another point where British and American English have diverged. Or make use of the fact that he current pronunciation is the result of a _recent_ mistake, and restore some degree of unity by shifting the stress to the second syllable.
katarina said,
January 20, 2026 @ 1:16 pm
BTW, the Mandarin pronunciation of London is lwin dwin.
David Marjanović said,
January 20, 2026 @ 1:20 pm
Consistently /daˈvoːs/ in German and Austrian media, FWIW.
Of course the French spelling changed to Bâle centuries ago (and the pronunciation did another few centuries earlier).
David Marjanović said,
January 20, 2026 @ 1:23 pm
No, it's [˧˥luə̯n˥d̥uə̯n] (the first syllable has an inbuilt question mark, the second just stays up there).
Jonathan Smith said,
January 20, 2026 @ 3:19 pm
Re: Lundun, this is one of the those surprising phonotactic things — there is no Mandarin match for lən, dən etc. One that stayed with me is Chinese-speaking little kids hearing "lunch" and saying "looawnch".
Philip Taylor said,
January 20, 2026 @ 4:31 pm
Well, if I were to hear a Chinese speaker say that he had been to 轮动, I think I would understand where he meant …
M. Paul Shore said,
January 20, 2026 @ 4:59 pm
Jonathan Smith: “[T]here is no Mandarin match for lən, dən etc.”—not entirely true. For “dən” there’s a quite phonetically similar rare syllable dèn, with the meaning “tug/yank/pull”. And while there are no “len” syllables—they’re missing from the syllable repertory, not for any discernible systemic reason but seemingly just by linguistic accident—there are plenty of “leng” syllables, in all four tones, with a wide range of possible meanings. So a “lengden” of some kind could’ve been created for “London”—though that raises the question, did the Mandarin and English vowel sounds in question match up, at the time of such a potential creatiion, as well as they do today?
Victor Mair said,
January 20, 2026 @ 5:19 pm
One of the most mysterious hotel names I ever encountered was that of the Jinglun Hotel (Jīnglún fàndiàn 京伦饭店) in Beijing. I actually stayed in the Jinglun Hotel shortly after it opened in September, 1984. The Jinglun Hotel was one of the first fancy — "starred" [it was considered as having 4 stars]) — hotels in China.
Staying there, I naturally was curious about the meaning of the name of the hotel. I guessed that the jīng 京 part referred to Beijing and wondered mightily about the lún 伦 segment. Lúndūn 倫敦 ("London"), I hypothesized. That would make sense, but nobody would confirm that's what "Jinglun" really stood for. People gave me all sorts of weird suggestions, such as that "Jinglun" was the name of an old bridge in the vicinity.
In those days I was going to China often, and the Jinglun was on the way from the airport to the heart of Beijing city. Every time I passed by the hotel, it bothered me that I didn't know the meaning of the name of the hotel.
Incidentally, the Jinglun was managed by a Japanese conglomerate, Rìháng jiǔdiàn jítuán 日航酒店集团 ("Okura Nikko Hotels") and thought there might be a clue in that connection. No luck.
It was only after several years of bewilderment that my medieval Sino-Central Asian historian friend, Yu Taishan, told me that the name stood for "Beijing-Toronto" that I found out what it really meant. At first I didn't believe him. The theory sounded so improbable: taking the second syllable of "Beijing" and the middle syllable of "Toronto" (Duōlúnduō 多倫多) didn't sound very convincing to me.
Finally, after more years of seeking confirmation, I discovered that Yu Taishan's story rang true. Still today, though, you'll find lots of people in Beijing and throughout China who aren't sure what "Jīnglún 京伦" stands for.
By the way, if you're interested, the full Chinese name of the Jinglun Hotel is Běijīng Jīnglún Fàndiàn 北京京伦饭店.
Go figure.
ajay said,
January 21, 2026 @ 4:42 am
Of course the French spelling changed to Bâle centuries ago
Even worse!
Philip Taylor said,
January 21, 2026 @ 6:18 am
Once again, I asked ChatGPT —
to which it responded :
ajay said,
January 21, 2026 @ 11:50 am
I feel this bit
in Standard German it's pronounced "da-FŌS" (or, sometimes, "da-VŌS"), with variants in the Swiss German language (Schwiizerdütsch, which is not to be confused with the Swiss variety of Standard German) that include "Tafaas" and "Tafaa" (stress on the second syllable).
rather undermines the entire thread.
Yes, maybe, an Italian might have a case for saying "in Italian we call it 'Roma', everyone who lives in Italy and speaks Italian calls it 'Roma', it's been 'Roma' for centuries, you should call it 'Roma' not 'Rome'."
But if even the Swiss themselves can't agree on what it should be called, why the hell should the rest of us worry?
M. Paul Shore said,
January 21, 2026 @ 1:14 pm
Philip Taylor: The ChatGPT answer you received strikes me as being a good example of why AI in its present stochastic-parrot form, its significant cleverness notwithstanding, is not something to be trusted. The answer suffers in particular from (1) ChatGPT's having no real concept (not that it actually possesses any concepts of anything) of what the Mandarin and English syllables in question actually sound like; and (2) its apparently not making good enough use of, or even not having good enough access to, high-level Chinese lexicographical information sources, to be aware (so to speak) of some of the more obscure syllables and characters that could be pressed into service for the stated purpose.
For the first syllable, let's start with the tone. There's no way ChatGPT's apparent preference for second or third tone corresponds to the pitch of a normal pronunciation of the first syllable of "London": fourth or (less satisfactorily) first tone would be the obvious choice. (Note, by the way, that a wrong character is given for the rather obscure syllable lǔn: it should be 埨 ().) Regarding the vowel, I fail to see how "[d]espite [their] flaws, lun-like syllables [sic] are perceptually closest to English /lʌn/ for Mandarin speakers"–what's the source for that dubious-sounding claim? And I find it absurd that ChatGPT thinks that the wrong nasal of a "leng" syllable would be a big, big problem, but the wrong vowel of "lun" syllables and the absence of a nasal in "de" syllables (for the "-don" part) would hardly be problems at all: it seems clear to me that the opposite is true. My suggestion for the first syllable is therefore one of the lèngs–unless we were willing to make use of modern Mandarin digraphia to take an unusual approach. While it's true that that "len" syllables, contrary to what I mistakenly wrote earlier, have at least a shadowy existence, possibly only in the form of an exceedingly obscure variant reading lèn of 啉 "unintelligent", that character would be useless for phonetic purposes since it would be pretty much automatically interpreted by readers as a "lan" or "lin" syllable. But if we were to just put "lèn", in Roman letters, in front of modern Mandarin users, I see no reason they wouldn't know exactly what was meant. Unfortunately, though, as long as sinographs persist as the standard, that's obviously not feasible as the first element in an officially approved form.
For the second syllable, as I've pointed out before, a "den" syllable is the only good option, and in fact the only one that's available is dèn 㩐 (扽). So my final vote for a "London" transphoneticization or whatever we want to call it is lèngdèn 愣㩐, which would seem to mean something like "to dazedly tug" or "to recklessly tug" or "to persistently tug". Hey, it's not the most flattering description of that metropolis; but considering that 138 years ago Arthur Conan Doyle described London as "that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained", it's not the least flattering either!
Philip Taylor said,
January 21, 2026 @ 1:27 pm
Thank you for that excellent critical analysis of (some of) the weaknesses of ChatGPT, MPS. Yet despite your perfectly valid observations, I have found it useful in an analogous context. My brother-in-law, now resident in the UK, speaks virtually no English, and as Cornwall Council are currently offering no TESOL sessions for absolute beginners, I have to try to find some way to teach him British English (his L1 is Vietnamese). So, I choose a universe of discourse (e.g., the times of the day, as normally rendered in spoken English) and I ask ChatGPT :
to which ChatGPT responded (in part) :
I then told it that Thanh has a marked Saigon accent, and it optimised the suggested Vietnamese spellings on that basis. And, as far as I can tell, Thanh can read ChatGPT's suggestions and pronounce reasonably authentic-sounding words for the UNIV.
VVOV said,
January 21, 2026 @ 4:05 pm
Since no one else has commented on it, I want to express disagreement with the OP’s view that American English language media shows excessive “reverence for the Spanish language” or that it’s hypocritical to pronounce Spanish lexemes in a more “native” way than German ones.
Spanish is spoken more than any other non English language in the US *by far*, and is arguably a de facto second natural language. The audience of PBS almost certainly includes an order of magnitude more Spanish speakers than German speakers, and it’s fair imo to have a more code switch-y approach to Spanish words and phrases mentioned in English language media, rather than always treating them as anglicized-pronunciation loan words.
VVOV said,
January 21, 2026 @ 4:06 pm
Typo, “… second national language.”
CuConnacht said,
January 21, 2026 @ 4:16 pm
Based on no scientific sample, the British these days tend to say tu RIN while Americans say TU rin (if they don't say to REE no). So Davos is not alone in having two English pronunciations, neither of which is how the natives say it.
Moving off-topic, I learned recently that Spanish for Aachen/Aix-la-Chapelle is Aquisgrán. And it took me a moment to realize that Bois-le-Duc in Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic is s'Hertogenbosch.
Jonathan Smith said,
January 21, 2026 @ 8:14 pm
@M. Paul Shore I'm sure they say den4 somewhere (some Pekingese, interwebs suggest), but no — absence of ten/den/len is a regular gap in standard Mandarin and foreign words like London > lundun is normal. Why normaler than lengdeng, I dunno. There is however the isolated word nen4 'tender etc' which seems to be standard, though note often nun4 in countryish.
Chris Button said,
January 21, 2026 @ 8:15 pm
I hope the two commenters don't mind me pointing out that this is unintentionally quite a funny exchange
Chris Button said,
January 21, 2026 @ 8:17 pm
Bopomofo really shines relative to pinyin in this regard.
VVOV said,
January 21, 2026 @ 11:57 pm
@CuConnacht, I think that city is fairly well known as “Torino” in (at least American) English specifically because of the 2006 Winter Olympics, where it was consistently referred to as “Torino” in English language broadcasts and other marketing.
M. Paul Shore said,
January 22, 2026 @ 1:28 am
Jonathan Smith: I too see no indication of the existence of "ten" syllables; and as I indicated above, "len" syllables are on the very edge of nonexistence; but the existence of dèn is indisputable. Its existence is reflected (in the form of a toneless abstraction, of course) in syllable tables; and there's a character for it that has no other reading, namely 㩐 (扽).
I agree that the coining of 倫敦 for "London"–which, remember, the discussion was speculating about better alternatives to, however uselessly–is slightly mysterious. Maybe something to do with what the exact qualities of the English and Mandarin sounds were back when the coinage occurred, including which dialects of English and Mandarin were involved?
Michael Watts said,
January 22, 2026 @ 1:51 am
Eh, maybe. I've personally met someone whose name was Lenka. (I don't know the characters.)
ajay said,
January 22, 2026 @ 9:00 am
Actual Londoners with the city's accent tend to pronounce the city as "Lahn'an", which might be easier to transliterate?
Jonathan Smith said,
January 22, 2026 @ 9:34 am
^ Yes or writings like "倫敦" could have begun in another Chinese language e.g. Cantonese
There's no such thing as the general existence or not of dèn; it's a matter of what people do/don't and can/can't say (that "there's a character" doesn't matter — ask a range of people to read these and see what you get.) So FWIW den is nonexistent to highly marginal in MSM and won't appear in say sanctioned place-name transcriptions.
And really (MSM) -en is somehow not very satisfying for English ən anyway — note Nixon > 尼克松, Washington > 华盛顿, Boston > 波士顿 etc. etc. ChatGPT can find only -sen names (Wilson > 威尔森 etc.) in this pattern. And again hard to say without deeper study which of all of the above were coined in something like MSM.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
January 22, 2026 @ 11:20 am
@ajay Actual Londoners with the city's accent tend to pronounce the city as "Lahn'an" — It's not clear to me what that respelling is trying to show, but actual Londoders say the name like this which I don't think fits it.
~flow said,
January 22, 2026 @ 7:17 pm
>In a PBS-world where reverence for the Spanish language is so extreme that to not flip the "r" in "Maduro" and not de-aspirate the "t" in "Latino" practically count as racist hate-crimes
I normally do not throw books into the waste bin out of respect for books. I still have done it with computer teaching books (not real books just made to look like books, as a friend of mine remarked about a subset of that genre), and I did it with a book about German language from the 1930s which I at the time called "the most hateful discussion of speech that I know of".
The above comment is despicable.
Philip Taylor said,
January 23, 2026 @ 6:26 am
Did you not interpret it as humour, ~flow ? I most certainly did …
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
January 23, 2026 @ 9:00 am
Philip,
No, you alamort, active citizen ("The Rogue's Lexicon", 1850 — my new favorite book, discovered on LL), you don't understand American culture.
You must understand two things:
(1) that those on the extreme left and extreme right of the political spectrum here give no quarter to "humo(u)r" (for it might cause the party-liners to perhaps question the seriousness of inflexible, scorched-earth thinking, you see, and we can't have that).
(2) that for those same groups, no hill is too small to die on. Fight every battle. Admit no wrong. Broker no compromise. Kill! Kill! Kill!
We are, indeed, a wild and "wonderful" (in the original sense) people, Philip.
Killer said,
January 23, 2026 @ 3:23 pm
Americans who have spent time in Australia sometimes come back pronouncing Melbourne as “MEL-bn”, as if they’re being alol authentic. This is momentarily confusing and then simply irritating. If they pronounced “Perth” or “Adelaide” or “Darwin” with an Australian pronunciation, they’d be laughed out of the room, but they can sort of get away with the “Mel-bn” affectation. (I’m American, too, BTW.)
Philip Taylor said,
January 23, 2026 @ 4:55 pm
And as a Briton who spent six weeks working with CSIRO Melbourne in 1987, I returned to the UK saying "Melbn" and have done so ever since. But I don't understand what is meant by "alol authentic".
Randolph Head said,
January 23, 2026 @ 9:27 pm
I'm glad that someone else besides me has been writing PBS to get them to stop mispronouncing "DaVOS". I did so for at least a decade, every year, back in the 90s and aughts, and finally got a reply that "That's how the Brits say it and we're not changing that." That the Swiss pronounce it slightly differently from place to place in Switzerland — I would say, those whose Schwiizertütch is eastern or south eastern, tend to voice the "v" sound because of the Romansh origins, which are also behind the placement of the stress, whereas those from farther away in Switzerland are more likely to Germanize the written V to unvoiced, as it is German — is not important. Anyway, no one in Switzerland says DAvos. Or it may be the difference between Walsertüütch and what I've heard called Romanischbündnerdüütch (which is spoken in regions that were Romansh or bilingual into the early modern period)
It does remind me of the young American who once asked me for directions on the train platform in nearby Sargans (sarGANS!). Recognizing me as an American, he asked, "which train goes to Chur", which he pronounced as though it were in English, that is fricative ch-schwa-swallowed r, to rhyme with 'burr'. Meanwhile, different Swiss pronounce it either as starting with a glottal fricative, or with a palatal stop….cchhur, or kur. None of them use a schwa, though!
Killer said,
January 23, 2026 @ 9:31 pm
@Philip Taylor – I can see “Melbn” working in a non-rhotic country, but in the US it just sounds affected.
“alol” is a typo where I meant to say, “being all authentic,” or really, “being all authentic ’n’ sh*t” [and rolling my eyes].
Philip Taylor said,
January 24, 2026 @ 4:51 am
Well, it's certainly an uncommon pronunciation even in the non-rhotic parts of Great Britain, but I don't feel I am being "affected" when I use it, Killer, just showing respect to the residents of that great metropolis.
David Marjanović said,
January 24, 2026 @ 12:22 pm
Ah, the joys of Artificial Idiocy.
False. There is no front vowel there; it's u, not ü.
I don't mind… I can't mind, because I don't get it. I was aiming for phonetic pedantry, if that's what you mean, because FXA is (part of) the topic here.
A uvular fricative, or a more or less velar affricate :-)
ajay said,
January 26, 2026 @ 8:38 am
It's not clear to me what that respelling is trying to show, but actual Londoders say the name like this which I don't think fits it.
Well, I, a man who spent more than two decades living in London, have certainly been shown the error of my ways by that YouTube clip. Thanks.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
January 27, 2026 @ 4:44 pm
@ajay Well, be my guest by all means, but what was your respelling supposed to show? To me, it shows [lɑːnən], or if you want to respell it regularly, Larnan. Was that your intention?