Staking claim on how to say state name.

Byline: Bob Welch / The Register-Guard

For those of you who gently took me to task for my recent suggestion that Oregon is pronounced OIR-GUN, I have a question for you: Why so gentle?

I deserve worse. Tie me to a Douglas fir and force me to watch, on a portable VCR, Oregon State's 50-21 win over the Ducks in 2004. Or give me a winter at Fort Clatsop with Lewis & Clark.

Here I am, a native Oregonian who regularly swoons over the place in print and who has a library with its own "Oregon Collection" - and I muff the written pronunciation of the state.

I feel like the Eugene Chamber of Commerce touting the Friday Market.

OK, so how, in print, do you represent the correct pronunciation of our state?

The answer is easier said than written, in part because I can't offer all those dictionary symbols such as the upside-down "e" and that carrot thingamajig. And in part because books about the state are curiously silent on the subject.

The "Oregon Blue Book" will tell you that our state seashell is the hairy triton, but is strangely silent on how to say "Oregon."

The "Pronunciation Guide of Oregon Place Names" gives phonetic spellings for 7,000 places, including the controversial Yaquina Bay (yuk-KEEN-uh, it says; ha!), but offers nothing for "Oregon" itself.

In its 106-plus years of publication, "Oregon Historical Quarterly" has never addressed the subject, to the knowledge of Richard Engeman, public historian for the Oregon Historical Society.

But Engeman believes it's OR-rie-gun. And Duncan McDonald, a University of Oregon journalism professor who's written books on grammar and language, favors OR-ee-gun.

Others prefer the OR-y-gun popularized by car decals, UO shirts and Eugene writer James Cloutier, author of "The Best of Orygun: Or, Learning How to Say `Oregon' So Everyone Won't Think You're from New Jersey."

"It just makes a lot of sense to me," says Cloutier (pronounced, by the way, Clue-Tee-AY).

Julie Yamaka, managing editor of the Oregon Blue Book, says `we naturally go with the pronunciation that graces the front of those eye-catching green-and-yellow T-shirts commonly seen around Autzen Stadium that say `Orygun' across the chest.'

In the interest of full disclosure, she also points out that two of the three Blue Book editors are Ducks.

But some aren't buying "Orygun," even at the UO. Among them: Jeff Ostler, a UO history professor who teaches about the Pacific Northwest. He suggests OR-a-gun.

"It needs to be clear that there are three syllables," he writes, which, of course, was my sin of omission. `It's the middle syllable that is the hardest. The sound I hear when native Oregonians pronounce the word is probably more a short `a' rather than a short `i' .'

Author Shannon Applegate of Yoncalla, whose ancestors were among the first settlers in the state, prefers OR-a-gun - and emphasizes an emphatic "OR."

And Register-Guard editorial page editor Jack Wilson likes OAR-y-gun, which not only works phonetically, but culls disparate symbols of the outdoors that so well define the state.

So who, in the end, gets to decide? Nobody, really. And everybody.

"There's no simple answer," says Scott Delancey, a UO linguistics professor. The French, he points out, have a national academy that makes such decisions. "We don't have anything of the kind."

Even dictionaries leave the door open for interpretation. Webster's New World College Dictionary offers two definitions, one that jibes with how most Oregonians pronounce the state and another that drives Oregonians bonkers - in essence, ar-GAWN.

"But not locally," the dictionary says, suggesting that the rules are so flexible that, like traffic laws, they change at state lines.

Me? I'm going with OR-y-gun - while hoping to forget my phonetic belly flop that got us into a discussion that will surely continue.