Easy, that’s because in English words don’t end with the “eh” sound. Not a single English word ends with that sound; it’s only found between consonants.

I’ll therefore take my ancient friend Don Juan

admits no dispute. I already know I have a tin ear and a bad memory. Even so, I read the whole thing hearing “Juan” as a monosyllable and managed to enjoy it, for variable values of “enjoy”.

Thus one heard El Presidente, Espana, Mehico, Cuidads this or that, Estados De here and there. Holidays and dates were liable to come out either way.

I visited LA a few years later and she was using English for the same words. That seemed odd since the local majority is now Spanish speakers.

Anyone who is embarassed about not knowing every word and how others think it should sound has an immense ego problem. No one has ever had such knowledge.

But I think your ear is right: what it sounds like in Spanish is not all that important. I think of “Donkey Ho-tey” as the correct name of the character in English, just as London is called Londres in Spanish or México (sounds like MEH-hee-coh) is called Mexico in English.

#106: I don’t know, but I can tell you that it certainly doesn’t happen in Spanish, where spelling is (nearly) phonetic.

I’m not angry at the people (who are, as you say, just following the only convention they know), I’m angry at the whole situation. Why couldn’t Dylan have married a Mary or a Louise, so that Caitlin would have stayed among the people who know how to pronounce it? Of course I sound like a prescriptivist; emotionally, I am a prescriptivist, like almost everyone. One of the points of studying linguistics is to superimpose an intellectual descriptivism on the natural human preference for what we grew up with or learned to value from Authorities. I can’t help disliking the use of disinterested to mean ‘uninterested’; what I can do is to realize that my personal disapproval is intellectually irrelevant and should not be brought into a discussion of the merits of the word, any more than my personal dislike of fish should influence a discussion of the human diet. This is a small but crucial step that most people seem to find almost impossible to take.

#186: segue is a verb, pronounced like the noun.

#187: Merriam-Webster lists trow-ma ahead of traw-ma, though American Heritage reverses that.

E.g.:

“trowma” (trauma)
“sahntimeter” (centimeter)

This is not 100% relevant to this thread, but it’s a pet peeve of mine that isn’t likely to have an interested reception anywhere else.

I’ve had a few of these. One I haven’t seen mentioned yet: I thought “segue” was a verb, and that when you segued between two things you created a “segueway”.

Roy Belmont, I still have no clear idea what class you were looking forward to in the 5th grade. GeoMETry? But in the US we don’t usually take that until 10th grade, if the school offers it at all.

How else would you say it?

I always mentally pronounced “misled” as a homophone of “mizzled”. Similarly “anxiety” had only three syllables… “anks-it-ee”.

Me too, but “myzled” and “ankshety” (to go with “anxious”.

You-cry-EE-na”—it sounds much like the weird trend for some 80s newscasters to pronounce “Nicaragua” with an exaggerated Spanish-ish accent, which was much mocked on SNL (I think).

I thought the person upthread was saying that it was ridiculous for Brits to pronounce it “Nicaragyouwah”.