3 Responses for "Colombia ~ Columbia ~ Colombo"

1. Joh May 10th, 2009 at 12:29 am

   Wikipedia says that the name of the capital is locally pronounced [ˈkoləmbə], and is a borrowing into Sinhalese and Tamil from Portuguese, which in turn borrowed it from Classical Sinhalese. I do not know where the stress falls in other European languages. Penultimate stress may reflect analogy with one of the other two (both ultimately from Cristoforo Colombo, of course), or if it is particular to English, the general English rule “When in doubt, use penultimate stress.”

   The discrepancy between Columbia and Colombia ultimately goes back to the Proto-Western-Romance vowel shift. If Columbus was indeed from Genoa, though, he apparently would have pronounced his name [kuˈɹuŋbu], but this must be a further sound-change in Ligurian specifically.

2. Keith Mundy May 11th, 2009 at 12:57 pm

   Colombia, in my experience, is typically pronounced the same as Columbia, and for that reason is often misspelt as Columbia.

   I’ve never seen Colombo (often pronounced Columbo as in the detective series, including by Sri Lankans) confused with either of them.

3. John Cowan May 13th, 2009 at 11:48 pm

   Looks like the schwa letters dropped out of my posting. Colombo is ['kol@mb@], writing @ for schwa.