American place names
or rather the play between their spellings and their pronunciations. Los Angeles (Law San-juh-lees). Duluth. Sault Ste. Marie. Mackinac. Tejon. Baltimore (Ball-mer). New Orleans (Nawr-lins). Baton Rouge. Jal (Hal). Omaha. Sepulveda. Cahuenga. Chickamauga. The mother language of American is English, and English stole from maybe a hundred languages to get its vocabulary. Following a good example, American learned its place names from several dozen languages. and, of course, made some words up as it went along. Like Tarzana. Lovely!
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