‘The Royal Pavilion in Brighton is a palace on a Steine,’ said my husband in a dislocated response to learning that East Palestine, Ohio, is pronounced ‘palace-steen’. We’d never heard of the place, pop. 4,761, before a train crashed there, letting out fumes. Its name sounded like a claim to be further east than the original Palestine, but it turns out that when the village changed its name from Mechanicsburg in 1875, the post office added the label East to distinguish it from an existing Palestine in Ohio (pop. today 180). Palestine was, it seems, a name chosen by Rebecca Chamberlin, wife of the settlement’s first resident physician and postmaster – ‘the quiet beauty of the little town, and the earnest, virtuous, simple life of its people suggesting to her a name recalling holy memories’, according to a 1905 history of Columbiana County, Ohio.
Still, –steen is an odd way to pronounce the last syllable of Palestine. A few years ago I was wondering here about that sound for the last syllable of Harvey Weinstein, or Jeffrey Epstein. But the lively online Antigone Journal has also been discussing on Twitter the American pronunciations of Constantine and Augustine. They tend to make both end in –teen, and Augustine begin with a stressed syllable, like the month of August. And if Americans pronounce the first syllable of Aeschylus to rhyme with desk, what do they do with Aesop?
A tweeter who uses the name Giovanni Lido (a 6th-century Byzantine writer) made the complementary point that ae, in English words deriving from Latin, is never pronounced like the vowel in buy. Among his examples were Caesar, mediaeval, haemophilia and Thermopylae. That, I’d add, is why Edward Lear wrote about the ‘old man of Thermopylae,/ Who never did anything properly’.
As for classical authors, we used to know Cicero (his cognomen) as ‘Tully’ (from his nomen, Tullius). There is a village (pop. 951) in New York State called Tully in his honour and a town (pop. 85,268) in Illinois called Cicero.
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