Well, it's somewhat of a Southern thing to call St. Louis "Lou-ee" so the song might do that. Just like how New Orleans is pronounced "N'Awlins" more locally, where as I would say New "Or-leens" and then in France the end would be "Or-lay-ahn". But the general pronunciation is to pronounce the S. The silent S is still around, but it's not the most common pronunciation across the board in America. FWIW, people who live in St. Louis pronounce the S and say they can identify a foreigner if they pronounce it in the French manner.
Listening to the song again "Meet me in St. Louis", it's funny to note that "St." is still pronounced with the hard "t" when in French it would be "San Loo-ee". So, St. Louis still being pronounced with a silent S while the hard T has been adopted is just indicative of the word being stuck in evolution for a minority.
American English tends towards a more simplistic spelling style, but there's still relics of consonants never pronounced (knives with the silent K and gnats with a silent G), where as we remove what we see as superfluous U's and turn hard S's into Z's. Then we also have words borrowed from other languages where the foreign pronunciation is adopted by some. And then there's words like "ballet" and "fillet" with the silent "t" at the end. English is such a hodge podge of different languages--Latin, French, Anglo-Saxon--that I still find the idea of basing punctuation rules on pronunciation to be problematic.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-04-16 04:22 am (UTC)Listening to the song again "Meet me in St. Louis", it's funny to note that "St." is still pronounced with the hard "t" when in French it would be "San Loo-ee". So, St. Louis still being pronounced with a silent S while the hard T has been adopted is just indicative of the word being stuck in evolution for a minority.
American English tends towards a more simplistic spelling style, but there's still relics of consonants never pronounced (knives with the silent K and gnats with a silent G), where as we remove what we see as superfluous U's and turn hard S's into Z's. Then we also have words borrowed from other languages where the foreign pronunciation is adopted by some. And then there's words like "ballet" and "fillet" with the silent "t" at the end. English is such a hodge podge of different languages--Latin, French, Anglo-Saxon--that I still find the idea of basing punctuation rules on pronunciation to be problematic.