General Urban Kitchener Updates and Rumours

[Acitta]

I wonder how they came up with that haha. In the German language, Huether isn't pronounced anything like "heater"...it's more like...hoo-tear? I guess it was probably just easier to say. I'm fluent in German but the pronunciation of things is still a challenge and I've always referred to it as "Hugh-thur" as well.

In German 'ue' is just a way of not having to use an umlaut diacritic, 'ü' and keep your set of movable type limited and thus less expensive. So 'Huether' is just a variation of 'Hüter', which means 'herdsman'.

The pronunciation shown using IPA is /ˈhyːtɐ/.

That /yː/ phoneme is done by rounding your lips as if IPA /uː/ (the 'oo' of English 'food' or 'u' in 'rule') but making the sound of IPA /iː/ (the 'ee' of English 'feet' or 'ea' of 'heat'). Since neither /yː/ is not part of English and you have problems making it, just saying /iː/ is the more commonly accepted approximation for non-native speakers. As it is a monophthong, not a diphthong, saying IPA /iːuː/ (or 'ee-oo' in English) would not work. But few Germans would scold a non-native speaker for saying /ˈhuːtɐ/ rather than /ˈhiːtɐ/ but the would if you tried to say /ˈhiːuːtɐ/

Interestingly, in Alemannic dialects, the Old High German vowel sounds that eventually became /yː/ in Middle High (and thus Standard) German ended up as /iː/ instead, and different vowel sounds turned in /yː/. So they both have , just in different places.

Having said all that, things go out the window when words get borrowed into another language, and the way they get adapted to that new language depends on the phonetics of it. So just because 'heetah' might be generally accepted way for a non-native speaker to say 'Huether' when speaking German, that it came into our English as sounding like 'hooter' or even 'hoother' because the lip rounding got emphasized instead of the /iː/ sound is perfectly OK.

The only "correct" pronunciations in languages are for peoples' names and endonyms for groups, out of basic human respect for each other. Everything else should be descriptivist rather than prescriptivist.

That is your linguistic rant for the day. :-)

In this article from The Record about the history of C.N. Huether's brewery in Kitchener, it mentions that "Blue Top became so popular that it became the company's name in 1936. The owners had already decided to drop the Huether name because then, as now, most people mispronounced the name saying "hugh-ther"."