Hi again and welcome back to Seattle Learning Academy's American English pronunciation podcast.

My name is Mandy and this is our 131st episode.

I don't talk about how to pronounce place names very often.

People take the pronunciation of place names very personally and place names very often. People take the pronunciation of place names very personally, and place names

often vary quite a bit between the people who live there and the people who don't live there.

Generally, individuals who don't live there use a more phonetic pronunciation. By the term phonetic,

I mean that it's pronounced as we would expect due to the spelling. However, there is one interesting and kind of surprising fact about place

name pronunciation when the word new is included in a two-word place name, such as the names New York or New Mexico.

These place names can be considered open compound nouns.

Compound nouns are words that combine two or more words.

This includes words like footprint, newspaper, credit card, and bus pass.

In that list, credit card and bus pass are called open compounds because there is a space between the words.

This makes them more difficult to classify as compound nouns and tends to cause more trouble for non-native speakers to stress correctly.

Most compound nouns, whether they are open or closed, are stressed on the first word.

This means that the stressed syllable of the first word is said with the most emphasis of all of the syllables the compound contains.

Even though names that include the word new can be considered open compound nouns, they aren't stressed like normal compound nouns.

Instead, open compound nouns that include the word new tend to be stressed

on the second word. There are quite a few place names beginning with the word new. New York,

New Hampshire, New England, New Orleans, New Mexico, New Delhi, New Guinea, New Brunswick, and New Zealand are just

some of the more well-known place names that include the word new.

The strange aspect of this pattern is that it is only common when the compound name is an

open compound. Once the words are joined, the word becomes a closed compound noun and no space remains.

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