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Actually, I pronounce it THAYL-yuh, with the accent on the first syllable. That's because I learned how to pronounce the name from watching an old American television show called The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, where Thalia Menninger was the beautiful girl the teenage Dobie had his main crush on, and that was how the name was said in that series:

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Many_Loves_of_Dobie_Gillis

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However, in the USA today most girls being given this name are of Hispanic or Greek descent, and they tend to pronounce it as TAHL-ee-ah, like the American television reporter Thalia Assuras does.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalia_Assuras

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By the way, the modern pronunciation with the "t" instead of the "th" sound I think has definitely been influenced by Spanish or other European languages where the English "th" sound does not occur. Since the original Greek name begins with "theta", and the Greek letter theta was pronounced with the sound heard in the English word "thin" by the 2nd century A.D., one could argue that a pronunciation with the "th" sound reflects better the way the name would have been pronounced when it was first brought into English from Greek.

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http://www.cogsci.indiana.edu/farg/harry/lan/thetapro.htm

This message was edited 11/30/2006, 1:30 PM