My lovely wife, Susan, sent me an e-mail this morning telling me that she was scheduled to be the announcer for the school geography bee today at the school where she works. Someone neglected to follow through on a promise to give her the materials last week so that she could have looked them over and been sure by today of how to pronounce all the place names, so Susan expressed to me a little anxiety about that. Here was my helpful advice in reply:
Make a lot of gutteral noises and back-of-the-throat hacking to simulate "authentic" local pronunciations. If it's a foreign country, all J's and X's are silent. All R's are rolled exotically. All V's are pronounced as B's, and all C's are pronounced as CH's (as in "church").
Emphasize random syllables. If a student asks you to repeat a pronunciation, roll your eyes extravagantly and say the word louder, but pronounce it slightly differently this time (perhaps just a vowel). Continue this pattern if he/she asks for more repeats, each time altering a different vowel or consonant.
Once the bee moves into the finals round, apply these pronunciation rules even to American place names. "Cincinatti" becomes "CHIN-chin-ah-TEE." "Washington" becomes "bah-SING-tone." "North Dakota" becomes "SHANK-eye-SHEK." Good luck!
Above all, make it fun for you, even if not for the students.
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