Martha said:
I was watching part of an old John Wayne movie this afternoon. He pronounced the Rio Grande as the Rio Grandie. Did people used to say that?
Most people who live near the river call it "the river", or "el rio". Still in Texas, but farther away, it's the Rio Grand (anglicized pronounciation), unless they're talking about the Rio Grande Valley area, in which case it's just called "The Valley" or "El Valle".
Here's a joke that may not come off in writing as well as it does when spoken.
Some tourists stopped to eat at a fast food restaurant in the small Texas town of Mexia. One lady politely asked the woman behind the counter "Can you tell me something, how do you pronounce the name of this place?"
The waitress stopped smacking her gum for a second, smiled at the old woman and then spoke slowly and carefully: "Sure sweetie. This here is the Dare-EE Kween! (Dairy Queen)"
(The name of the town is pronounced MuHayUh)
When you live in a state that used to be part of Mexico, and where anglos and hispanics and mexicans are constantly intermingling, you wind up with a lot of verbal strangeness and sometimes a little miscommunication.
HaHa said:
It's Spanish. In Spanish there are few or no silent letters.
Except for the letter "H" as someone else pointed out, and of course there is the letter J, which sounds like the English letter "H". Confused? Sometimes so are we.
One day one of my troops asked me if I ever heard of a hotel called the Ojo Inn. (Ojo is the Spanish word for eye, and is pronounced Oh-HO). He was trying to coordinate a meet with some guys just in from Mexico, and when he asked them what hotel they were staying in they told him it was called the Ojo Inn.
It turned out that they were staying at a Howard Johnson's branded hotel that went by the name HOJO INN. The Spanish speakers took one look at the sign and pronounced as they would in Spanish (h)Oh-Ho.