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They both mean "the" in Spanish. but Vegas (meadows) is a feminine noun so you use Las, and Angeles (angels) is a masculine noun so you use Los
I don't pronounce them the same.
Holup Vegas means Meadows? Twas an optimistic nomenclature I presume.
“The Meadows” has a much better ring to it than “The Cowboy Mafia Dirtpit”
Speak for yourself, the last one leaves no uncertainty of where you're going
I mean yeah… but you don’t want them to know that until they are tied up and in your trunk.
I just saw them in Atlanta last week. They're much better live.
The area around where Vegas is now was, at one point in time, relatively lush and green compared to the surrounding desert. It was a small oasis, half way between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City, where travellers stopped.
City Beautiful just put a fantastic video up on his YouTube channel about the history of Vegas.
No kidding. TIL
There’s a spot in the middle of town still called The Springs Preserve where the city originally got its water. Pretty interesting.
The Springs Preserve
Thank you for the video recommendation
Was named that way before it became a settlement by a Mexican trader. Before it was developed the Vegas valley actually had vegetation due to underground water and flowing creeks.
People seem to like naming things after whatever they destroyed in the process of building it.
I wonder how many angels were destroyed while building Los Angeles
*El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles
Los Gatos has become a much darker place.
Or saints while building Los Santos 🙏🏼
Who’s gonna tell them
Lol right? It was a desert there weren’t many meadows around to destroy.
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The city was named such because the vegas area actually had slightly more water than the surrounding areas (enough to support some wild grasses).
There should be a word for that.
Irony?
Probably the mad ravings of someone with heatstroke.
There’s lots of words that Americans borrow from other languages, and some keep their original pronounciations while others get a bit morphed over time. It’s kind of like a game of telephone.
As Americans, we pronounce Las Vegas pretty accurately. We pronounce Los Ángeles in a very anglicized way. In Spanish, g in Angeles should be pronounced like an “h.” Also the e’s make more of an “ay” sound. So Los Ángeles just got real messed up in this big game of telephone we play.
The town I live in is called "La Plata". Forget the "La" part, us gringos decided we knew how to pronounce "Plata" better and say it just like you'd imagine... (Play-tuh). My Colombian wife is slowly dying inside as she's subjected to this bastardization of her culture on a daily basis.
For the record she picked this town, not me.
I think it's all the pronunciation that was drilled into my head in high school spanish but I never pronounced it as play-tuh, it's always plah-tuh for me.
I think Los Robles is a beautiful name and how it rolls off the tongue but everyone calls it Row-bulls and it's terrible
Are you from Southern MD?
Slap my tits and call me Sally, you got me
Doesn't that mean money or cash or something like that?
As slang, yes. The literal meaning is silver, but it can be slang for money.
It might be better for a native speaker to answer, but I believe it directly translates to "silver"
It was a popular expression from Pablo Escobar IIRC... "Plata o Plomo" ("silver or lead").
How is it supposed to be pronounced? I'm thinking of "plah-ta".
Weird feeling when what's effectively your middle-of-nowhere hometown is offhandedly mentioned at the top of a random reddit thread.
Stay away from Missouri, they don't pronounce anything right. Worst of all is Versailles. They say, yep you guessed it, ver-sails.
Lol my grandma is from there. She pronounces it "Mizzoruh", I don't think she's the only one who does that
My mom is from a town originally founded by Swiss immigrants. Many of the streets are named after notable people from neighbouring countries. For instance, Mozart street is pronounced as "Mow-zart" by the locals. This drives my dad nuts, because he is fond of correct pronunciation, and listens to Mozart on the regular. I feel like there were a few other street names that he's complained about to my mom on the way back home after Christmas, when I was growing up.
And here in Virginia Buena Vista is pronounced bew-na vista
I’m in Arizona, and half the folks around here pronounce Buena “Ba-when-a”…like 3 separate and distinct syllables.
The Buena Vista in Colorado is pronounced Byoo-na Vee-sta.
Apparently it was supposed to symbolize the unity between the English and Spanish speakers in the town so you pronounce Buena the gringo way and Vista the Spanish way.
This thread is making me die a little more and more inside the more I read...
I lived in a town called El Dorado, Arkansas. Pronounced “El de-Ray-do.”
Lmao they have to intentionally mispronounce that, it even ignores English rules
So there’s a town in Texas called Mexia. One day two traveling salesmen were arguing about how to pronounce it. One insisted it must be MECKzia, like Mexico but with an a. The other one insisted (correctly) it was muhHEYa, as if it were Spanish. So they eventually called over someone at the restaurant where they were eating lunch and asked “how do you pronounce the name of this place?” She smiled politely at them and replied “day-ree kween.”
Ahm-mah-rill-oh texas
There’s a small town in Oklahoma called Miami…pronounced “mi-am-uh”…
Detroit's another. Everyone says "Dee-troyt" but if you want to be an originalist about it it'd be more like "Day-twaa".
It was Angelesized.
However pronunciations within Spanish can vary wildly depending on the country. Colombians pronounce y like a j, Spaniards speak with a lisp, etc
I may be wrong, but it isn't the same as a lisp, which is a speech impairment rather than intentional pronunciation. I think it's supposed to be just a change in tongue placement that makes it sound different. The "s" is further back, but if you move your tongue towards the teeth more while still allowing air to pass over, it begins to sound more like "th". I personally pronounce "th" with my tongue just behind my teeth and the flatter part (just behind the tip) up almost touching the roof of my mouth, and the Spanish "s" with my tongue down towards the bottom of my mouth but slightly up at the very tip so it's nearer to my teeth than a regular "s".
I suppose . Im not an expert
It originally came from some king that had a lisp and people started pronouncing like that to imitate him. It was after colonization and that's why it didn't happen in the colonies.
Not sure why you are saying "we." Spanish is a massive language in the US. Tons of people here say "los" the way it's spelled. Many even say the "g" softly.
There’s always exceptions, but in my experience, many Americans that speak Spanish still pronounce Southern Californian cities in the “Californian way.” I know that some people do pronounce the cities in the original Spanish, but it would have made my comment hard to read if I had said “non-Spanish speaking Americans and many Spanish-speaking Americans pronounce it like…”
I do both just depending on the language I'm speaking at the time. So I think your statement stands.
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The hoe-you say?!
Correct. Los and Las are not pronounced the same.
As you shouldn't because they aren't...
This is correct and they are not pronounced the same.
I think (if your first language is English) you do pronounce them the same. Because we're highly literate today we tend to think that we must pronounce words differently when they're spelled differently. But I'm almost certain there's no phonetic difference between the "Las" in "Las Vegas" and the "Los" in "Los Angeles" for speakers of American English. It seems different because we know we're saying Las" and "Los", but we're actually producing the same sound.
edit: Wiktionary has Las Vegas as /lɑs ˈveɪɡəs/ and it has a few different pronunciations for Los Angeles. But the one that sounds like how I would say it is /lɑs ˈændʒələs/. Same lɑs
LXS VEGXS
They aren't supposed to be pronounced the same. They're Spanish words and pronounced differently if you pronounce them correctly.
Man I was doubting three decades of my existence when I read the OP.
I'm Mexican and was doubting if you pronounce them the same
Same here. And I lived in one of the mentioned states for a while so I was so so so confused if I have been mispronouncing it wrong all my life because I don't pronounce them the same
Even if pronounced incorrectly, they aren't the same. The las in Las Vegas gets it's correct pronunciation, but I hear the los in Los Angeles produced like the English word "loss."
It's a dialect thing. At least in my midwestern dialect, I pronounce the two like "loss". This is how I've always heard it, and until now I never even noticed I pronounced them the same way.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around someone thinking these two cities’ names are in English.
It's entirely correct to pronounce them the same in English. In Spanish, no. But they are loan words in English and fit into whatever native English one speaks. English speakers don't pronounce the k in knee from German. Nor do they roll the r in burrito. Nor the h sound in Rio de Janeiro. Nor the wa sound in Illinois. Words are borrowed and take on their borrowing language's phonetic rules.
Yeah exactly I was like what the fuck is this post talking about. Nobody normal pronounces those the same
Although they do mean the same thing haha it's kinda funny
They do! It's just that Spanish has grammatical genders so las is "feminine" and "Los" is "masculine"
Why is Kansas, Kansas but Arkansas is Ar-Kin-Saw?
America explain!
I am conFUSION.
aggressive screen tapping
The word “Arkansas” comes from the French name for a local tribe. In French final consonants aren’t usually pronounced, so Ark-an-sa. You can see the French pronunciation also in the Ouachita (Wash-i-tah) Mountains, which are in Arkansas.
Kansas is named after a similar/the same tribe, but the word follows English pronunciation rules.
Fun fact : in French, we pronounce it "ar-kan-sas" nowadays. Because because.
Source : I am a professionnal French with due certifications.
Qu'est-ce qu'un francais professionnel?
Oh, very Baguette !
Translation in the language of Jay-Z afterward :
Un français professionnel est produit à partir d'une personne atteinte de Francitude aigüe par l'intermédiaire d'une formation renforcée à l'usage de l'argot, du louchébem et du javanais, à la résistance aux odeurs de fromage et à l'insulte des britanniques. Attention : ne reproduisez pas ça chez vous !
A professionnal French is produced from a person experiencing accute frenchness through reinforced training at speaking slangs like argot, louchébem and javanese, at resisting cheese smell and at insulting Brits. Warning : do not reproduce this at home !
Y’all just have to be one step ahead or the whole French people being cool thing will fall apart, no shade, I respect the game
Here's a fun one: as a Kansas native, I always pronounced "Arkansas River" as "Our Kansas", but the state as "Ar Kan Saw". It wasn't until my late teens that I found out the name of the river is pronounced the same way as the state in every state except Kansas.
What happened in your late teens that caused all the other states except Kansas to start pronouncing it like the state?