That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, wrote the bard in Romeo and Juliet. But, how you pronounce the name of our state can be fighting words in some quarters. Susy Simoneaux has this week's question for The Answer Dude.
I hope you can answer this question that I have posed to many locals yet no one has been able to answer. I was not born in Arkansas, but it is home to me and I want to know everything about it. Why is Arkansas pronounced ar-can-saw and Kansas pronounced cans-us? Since the last six letters of each are identical, why isn't ArKansas pronounced ar-cans-us?
Well, Susy, the short answer is it's the law that Arkansas is pronounced ar-can-saw. You encounter dozens of native tribes, each with its own confounding language or dialect, and you attempt to record their names in your journal as best you can.
Think of it as a centuries-long game of multilingual "telephone. Which brings us to the legitimately confusing question of how the state of Kansas could be pronounced "KAN-zis" while the nearby state of Arkansas, with the addition of two simple letters, is pronounced "AR-kin-saw.
This very question was the subject of a fascinating pamphlet published way back in titled, "Fixing the Pronunciation of the Name Arkansas. The 'a' in each syllable with the Italian sound, and the accent on the first and last syllables, being the pronunciation formerly universally and now still most commonly used. Apparently, some eggheads at Webster's dictionary had changed the entry for Arkansas to include a new pronunciation note — "Ar- kan- sas, formerly Arkansaw" — and that sent red-blooded Arkansans into a lexicographical tizzy.
The authors of the Arkansas Historical Society pamphlet called it a "vicious pronunciation" with "no basis of reason, authority, or prior polite usage. The Arkansas Historical Society members argued that the divergent pronunciations of Arkansas and Kansas stem from similar French names given to two different Native America tribes. A Siouan tribe lived near the modern-day Kansas River and early French explorers called them by a version of their name, which sounded to their French ears like "Kansa.
Those tribal names, as the French rendered them, look and sound very similar, but again, for reasons unknown, early French explorers wrote out the associated place names very differently. It's the English spelling though, so naturally, we pronounce the final "s. The French, however, left their mark on Arkansas ' pronunciation.
French explorers learned of a sect of the Quapaw, a Native American tribe in the territory now known as Arkansas, from the Algonquians, who called the people akansa most likely related to the Kansa tribe.
Various French documents and books spelled the state's name various ways — Arkancas, Akansa, Arkanceas. But "it is absolutely certain that the name as pronounced by the Indians was the same as if pronounced in our language Arkansaw ," according to the "Publication of the Arkansas Historical Association.
The "s" on the end is simply a French addition then and a silent one at that. There's evidence that some people tried to say the "s" as in Ar-kan-zus after the formation of the state government.
In , the Arkansas state legislature ruled on that matter, noting the "confusion" about the state's pronunciation. In French the final plural s is not pronounced. Somehow, the English speakers that took over after the Louisiana Purchase decided to go with a modified French spelling along with a French pronunciation — an s on the page, but not on the tongue. Incidentally, the name Ozark comes from French aux Arcs, short for aux Arcansas.
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