Remembering this from school years ago: The french were the first to colonize lots of the Mississippi River valley, from Illinois to New Orleans. Lots of places were named by them and then mispronounced by anglos who moved in later. Louisiana mostly retained enough french speakers to avoid it, but farther up river the pronunciations and then eventually the spellings changed over time
I am a native English speaker and knew all of that and STILL had to have the Ozarks = Aux Arcs part pointed out to me very recently. I’m just glad I can pass it along to someone else now!
Blame the french for the pronunciation. Also the Ozarks is just the anglo spelling of the french Aux Arcs
Wait what
Remembering this from school years ago: The french were the first to colonize lots of the Mississippi River valley, from Illinois to New Orleans. Lots of places were named by them and then mispronounced by anglos who moved in later. Louisiana mostly retained enough french speakers to avoid it, but farther up river the pronunciations and then eventually the spellings changed over time
Yeah it makes perfect sense historical and I actually was aware of most of that. But as an ESL speaker I would never have figured that on my own
I am a native English speaker and knew all of that and STILL had to have the Ozarks = Aux Arcs part pointed out to me very recently. I’m just glad I can pass it along to someone else now!