How come we pronounce Kansas (cans-as) but we pronounce Arkansas (are-can-saw)?

Question

they are both spelled with the same root letters kansas just that one word has an ar in the front but they are still pronounced differently

Answer 1

Arkansas

Many place names in our state, including Arkansas, are French pronunciations of Indian words.

At the time of the early French exploration, a tribe of Indians, the Quapaws, lived West of the Mississippi and north of the Arkansas River. The Quapaws, or OO-GAQ-PA, were also known as the downstream people, or UGAKHOPAG. The Algonkian-speaking Indians of the Ohio Valley called them the Arkansas, or "south wind."

The state's name has been spelled several ways throughout history. In Marquette and Joliet's "Journal of 1673", the Indian name is spelled AKANSEA. In LaSalle's map a few years later, it's spelled ACANSA. A map based on the journey of La Harpe in 1718-1722 refers to the river as the ARKANSAS and to the Indians as LES AKANSAS. In about 1811, Captain Zebulon Pike, a noted explorer, spelled it ARKANSAW.

During the early days of statehood, Arkansas' two U.S. Senators were divided on the spelling and pronunciation. One was always introduced as the senator from "ARkanSAW" and the other as the senator from "Ar-KANSAS." In 1881, the state's General Assembly passed a resolution declaring that the state's name should be spelled "Arkansas" but pronounced "Arkansaw."

The pronunciation preserves the memory of the Indians who were the original inhabitants of our state, while the spelling clearly dictates the nationality of the French adventurers who first explored this area.

Answer 2

DanE gave you a great answer.... for somebody living in Arkansas. The other side of the coin has nothing to do with Arkansas whatsoever.

Let's move north to the Sunflower State...

The Native American tribe, the Kanza, inhabited the area around present northeast Kansas and the river and eventually the territory in that region was named for them.

Interestingly enough within the state of Kansas the Arkansas River is not pronounced "AHR-cun-saw." It is pronounced "ahr-CAN-suss" in line with the pronuncian of our state. There is also a town in Kansas, Arkansas City... Same thing.... "ahr-CAN-suss" City.

Bill

Answer 3

DanE gave you a supper answer. I was just going to say that you could point to many other words in the English language that don't follow the rules either. Read and Read where one is reed and the other is red. We [reed] a book today but we [red] a book yesterday. Why do we pronounce them differently, just so that we can tell them apart in our speech? Why don't we spell them differently then? Because then they would be confused with a water plant or the color red. Why are cough and tough pronounced differently? They have the same dipthongs in the body of the word. Somehow, that is the way our language grew up.

Answer 4

I had a friend from Kansas and he pronounced it Ar-Kansas. He thought we were crazy because we were mispronouncing it.

Answer 5

I seem to recall that when I was a child, it WAS pronounced Arkansas.
Like when Ronald Reagan was a movie star, it was pronounced Ronald Reegan. When he went into politics it was pronounced Ronald Ragan.

Answer 6

It was handed down by our old folks having to pronounced them differently.