My weird home state

Ohio must be a weird place for travelers.

First of all, any state with counties named Hocking and Licking have to be a little strange.

But it's also full of cities and towns whose names are taken from various Native American cultures, which are somtimes rendered in more than one way in different places. So Pickaway county has the same origin as a town called Piqua in another part of the state. Cuyahoga has the same root as Cayuga. And Miami in one place is Maumee in another.

There are plenty of tongue twisters in there too: Tuscarawas, Pymatuning, Olentangy, Chillicothe, and my favorite - this one's actually of German origin - Gnadenhutten... inexplicably pronounced "ji NAY dun huh tehn."

But weird pronunciations are pretty common, even for easy looking names. Here's a list of towns and cities named after other more famous places, with their Ohio-ized pronunciations:

Medina = meh DIE nuh
Newark = NERK
Lima = LIE muh
Canton = CANT en
Vienna = vee EH nuh
Bellfontaine = behl FOWN tuhn
Houston = HOUSE tuhn
Louisville = LEW us vihl
Delhi = DELL hi
Berlin = BUR lynn
Milan = MEE lan
Versailles = ver SALES
Lancaster = LANK stir
Cairo = CARE oh
Carthagena = CAR thuh GEE nuh
New Athens = NEW AY thinz

and my favorite:

Russia = ROO she

What does all this have to do with anything?

Well, nothing really.

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