An ongoing debate about the pronunciation of the middle word in the phrase Mount Desert Island leads us to no firm conclusion.
The island, of course, got its name on September 5, 1604, when Samuel de Champlain sailed across Frenchman Bay. He later wrote in his notes:
“That same day we passed near to an island some four or five leagues long . . .The island is high and notched in places so that from the sea it gives the appearance of a range of seven or eight mountains one alongside the other. The summits are all bare and rocky. The slopes are covered with pines, firs, and birches. I named it Isle des Monts Desert.”
I’ve lived here quite a while, and if you say it [like the Mohave Desert], you’ll hear an old-timer agree with you. While across town, another old-timer, equally positive, insist that “In my family, we have always said it [like a piece of pie].” The problem is that Champlain, being a 17th-century French explorer, a.) had (at best) a very limited grasp of the English language, and b.) did not realize that any desert, contrary to popular belief, holds quite a great variety of life. He was trying to describe how the mountaintops, scraped bare by the glaciers that passed this way, thousands of years before he did, looked to him like deserts. Pronouncing it the way he did, though, in French, the word sounds more like dessert.
You can say the word like what Champlain meant, or like what he himself sounded like when he said it. Either (pronounced eee-ther or eye-ther) way is correct. 🙂
