Quote Originally Posted by Niblox View Post
...though Edimbourg (French) or Edimburgo (Italian) are perfectly acceptable.

The prononciation can vary. Locals say "ed-in-broh", with the stress on the first syllable, while those who do correct pronunication say with almost equal stress on all syllables.

To say "ed-in-burg" or "ed-in-burrow" really makes the toes curl!!


I am in the crowd using "ed-in-burra" while it has literally taken months to get my dutch american wife switched over from "ed-in-burg" to at least the somewhat closer "ed-in-burrow". We americans are often linguistically challenged preferring to americanize foreign names rather than embrace their native pronunciations.

Had a conversation with an 80 something year old native man in the countryside near Inverness when we had a rental car tire blowout, and finally got a good feel for most of what he was saying, especially the nearby places he was referencing, but his pronunciations were far from what mine would have been for the same named place given the spellings on the maps. I felt like a New Yorker in the deep american south with the degree of difference in the way we were using essentially the same language. It is true that the UK and US are one people separated by a common language.