"Pronounce Ligny" Topic

I think I can but as we're doing a public demo game next year, I thought I'd get it right & avoid looking like an idiot…..well, get it right anyway.

I thought it was pronounced Linyee

No. You can't make me.
I still have nightmares from that snooty snotty French babe mocking me over my pronunciation of "Vercingetorix".

Take the Hornblower approach. He was the only one on board his ship who spoke French so he pronounced it as if it were pronounced phonetically English.
The " Deux Freres" became the " Duke's Freers". Etc.

Try this.

link

so he pronounced it as if it were pronounced phonetically English.

Very much like your namesake, Winston Churchill.

Doug

Mark Twain had it right; they "spell better than they pronounce."

Like 'lignite' but with an eee instead of an ite……..

I could do it in person, but can't figure out how to write it. No G sound, but the N sound has kind of a roll to it. In Spanish the N would have a tilda over it. My mother's maiden name has one. Doesn't help you, does it?

Like lea knee

I would say Lea Njee

I've always said 'Lig-nee'

Li-knee

Lin Yee. No G if saying it in Belgium………..assuming you are actually Belgian, which few were who had any reason to mention the place around 16th June 1815

"Lee" as in Robert E. Lee, the Confederate General; and "Nyee" – nyet from the Russian, ending in EEEE instead of et. "Nyee."

Just my 2 cents.

GdeP

Take the Hornblower approach. He was the only one on board his ship who spoke French so he pronounced it as if it were pronounced phonetically English.
The " Deux Freres" became the " Duke's Freers". Etc.

I thought it was Lt. Bush that said Duke's Freers.

G de P's version does sound more "French" I must admit……yes!

It's French. The "G" is silent.

I always say ling ee. It's French so they probably have the "n" and the "g" the wrong way round anyway! ;-)

It's French so they probably have the "n" and the "g" the wrong way round anyway! ;-)

No, it's definitely spelled that way. Just like the French word for "line" – "ligne".

Line-ee

Lean yee

link

It sounds like she's saying "linn-ee". I always said "lin-yee." Not very manyanamous of me.

LINJI – ending with the I as in Literature, certainly no eeee situations.

A lot of differing opinions, any native French speakers here?

Yep

So it rhymes with stingy, is that right, BR?

I still have nightmares from that snooty snotty French babe mocking me over my pronunciation of "Vercingetorix".

Since he was a Celt, the name Vercingetorix should be pronounced with a heavy Welsh accent. The French language didn't even exist back then.

Tell THAT to the snooty, snotty mademoiselle.

Right tuscaloosa

I always pronounced it LIGG- NEE.

But it occurs to me that I might never have actually mentioned the word out loud or heard anyone else mention it.

Lean yi

Presumably pronounce it as English speakers would understand, like you would Paris

So it rhymes with stingy, is that right, BR?

That depends on how you pronouce "stingy" …

It also depends on how you say "pronounce" …

The local people all over the world have the strangest ways of pronouncing the places where they live. And if you are not one of them, they seldom recognize your attempt to pronounce the name of their home.

But, thanks to modern mass communications, more and more people *do* recognize the mangled versions of their placenames in common usage in English. Sometimes, as in Bombay or Peking, they even try to influence the accepted English language placename.

In theory, both my wife and I speak French. When we went to Ligny, we both at first would try to say the placename somewhere between "lin-ji" and "lean-yi", with appropriate soft consonants. The locals understood my wife perfectly, and began to ask her about Strasbourg (she has a marked Alsatian accent, often exactly identifiable to Strasbourg).

With me the locals just looked confused. My French accent is not from "la métropole", as I learned most of what I have of the spoken language in franco-phone Africa, "à l'outre-mer".

So, metaphysically brandishing my American passport, I gave them a good, solid, slightly loud, hard consonant, American-style : "LiGG-KNee".
And you know what? They all understood immediately!

And as a side-benefit, I got ice in my drinks without even asking.

:-)

- Sasha

Should this be called the knights who say nee?

How about Jena, Austerdadt (sp?) and Eylau then please

Yayna

Ower State (wherein 'Ower' rhymes with 'tower')

Eye Lao (wherein 'Lao' rhymes with 'now')

Around my house, Eylau is usually pronounced more like "bah-gra-tee-own-ovsk".
:-)

- Sasha

Thanks 4th – I was good (as it turns out) on 1 and 3 – 2 I would never have got to on my own…

Sasha – number 3 – was it called that in 1807 as well?

My post was supposed to be a little humorous, hence the smile symbol.

The place was liberated from the fascists in 1945, and retained by the soviets after the war under the name Багратионовск / Bagrationovsk, the center town of its район / rayon / district and an moderately important border crossing with Poland.

The place remains part of current Russia, in the exclave that has Königsburg (named Kaliningrad by the soviets) as the major city.
My wife is Russian and the remainder of my household is either Russian or from the Caucasus. So, indeed, the Eylau is known more by its current name "around my house".

I thought it might be a little funny to mention the current name because the place is named after the general prince Bagration – and the question of how to pronounce his name has arisen more than once.

- Sasha

'Liberated from fascists'?

I think "liberated from the fascists in 1945" is reasonably accurate and not too normative.

With the supression of the functions of the German Länder in the mid-1930's (the process of Gleichschaltung), German civil adminstration was structured around the Gaue, the regional subdivisions of the natioanal socialist party.

The area around Königsberg, including Eylau, was part of the Ostpreußen Gau. Indeed the place was the main town of the Kreise Preußisch-Eylau (like county seat in the USA).

The Ostpreußens Gauleiter, Reichsverteidigungskommissar und Oberpräsident was Erich Koch (1896-1986). He was member number 90 of the nazi party, joining in 1922. In the territories later occupied by the fascists, he was assigned additional duties as Gauleiter in Reichsgau Westpreußen, Zivilkommissar in Bialystok, and then as Reichskommissar of the Ukraine.

Convicted of war crimes (complicity in the murder of 400,000 Polish and Ukrainian civilians) and sentenced to death, his punishment was communted to life imprisonment. He died in a Polish prison.

Robert S. Wistrich wrote, in 2001, that Koch's rule in East Prussia was characterized by efforts to collectivize the local agriculture and harsh ruthlessness in dealing with opposition inside and outside the nazi party – and that his plans for mass-scale industrialization of the largely agricultural province made him unpopular among the local peasants.

But if "liberated from the fascists in 1945" sounds too value-laden to anyone, then I apologize. I could have written "taken by the Red Army in 1945" or "occupied by soviet forces in 1945".

- Sasha

P.S.
I am not trying to skip over the fact that the German population tried very hard to get out of the place as the Red Army advanced, and that the rather few who remained were forcably resettled in Germany by the soviets's ethnic cleansing in 1948.

P.P.S.
I would also say that Frankfurt was "liberated from the fascists", even though the city's medieval center and quite a few civilians (including the Prinzessin Marie Alexandra von Baden) were blown to bits by US and British bombers before Patton's US 3rd Army fought through the place in late March 1945.

Whether at Eylau or at Frankfurt the regular local people felt "liberated" or not, I really don't know. Most likely, at first they felt "relieved" not to be any more in an active combat zone. After that, the people of Frankfurt probably hoped for some food, tobacco and medical supplies from the Americans' supply echelons (with the added new experience of seeing actual Black men driving many of those trucks) …. and the people of Eylau likely hoped to be able to hide and escape from the NKVD units following the Red Army.

"Prussia, conquered by the russians and liberated from the prussians" sounds more melodiously perhaps? ;-)