Remember “Yanny or Laurel?” I experience a similar thing here on the metro.
On the Orange Line, there’s one station that gets announced and the way I hear it is very misleading:
To my ear, that sounds like “prochaine station row-zoo.”
The announcement when we get to the station is nearly the same, but just a tiny bit of difference is enough to understand what’s going on:
(Apologies for the low-quality phone recordings.)
What I think is happening here is that to my English-trained ear, the name “Rosemont” would have the emphasis on the first syllable, and be pronounced “Rose•mont.” In French, however, the syllables are split differently, the emphasis is on the second syllable, and the ending is nasalized resulting in a pronunciation like “Ro•suh•[mon]”… To convey this properly, I need to use International Phonetic Alphabet or something, but that’s beyond me.
In any case, with the ambient low-frequency noise of the metro, I lose the nasalized portion almost entirely.
What do you hear?