New York City boasts many uniquely named streets whose pronunciations have evolved over time, often leading to confusion. Tourists and residents alike mispronounce these names, a reflection of the city's melting pot culture. Linguistics expert Mitchell Moss notes that as languages blend, many Dutch names have lost their original sounds. For instance, Houston Street is commonly mispronounced like the Texas city, although it is meant to sound like "how-sten". This phenomenon illustrates the challenges of adapting to local speech across diverse communities, impacting how residents identify with their boroughs and landmarks.
"What happens is over time, we have people come in and they bring a bit of a language they have here, so a lot of things that were Dutch have become Americanized, which means they lost some of the Dutch color," explained Mitchell Moss, a linguistics expert at New York University.
"There are words that are too hard for people to understand, like the concept of the boroughs. No one uses the word borough, they use Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island ... People tend to not adapt to New York speech, they try to fit it into how we speak words, how they pronounce words."
The iconic street is frequently pronounced like the Texas city, but, like any native New Yorker will tell you, the name should be pronounced as "how-sten." The major thoroughfare was named after William Houstoun, one of the Founding Fathers of the US...
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