system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why are "Arkansas" and "Kansas" pronounced differently?
gpt
The names of both states come from a Native American word, "akakaze"; which, if it's Sioux, means "people of the south wind" and if Quapaw, "land of the downriver people" (there doesn't seem to be much consensus on which). It was actually the French that coined the word "Arcansas" in a very bad attempt to pronounce "akakaze".

In the French language, consonants at the end of a word are very often not pronounced, so in the French pronunciation of "Arcansas", or "Arkansas" as we now spell it, the final "s" is not pronounced.

Kansas used the natural English pronunciation, but in Arkansas there was confusion over whether "Arkansas" should be pronounced the English way or the French way. In 1819 it was called the "Territory of Arkansaw", but in 1836 it was admitted to the US as "Arkansas". When the state's two senators actually started arguing over the correct pronunciation, the state legislature had to step in, and passed the following resolution:

> Be it therefore resolved by both houses of the General Assembly, that the only true pronunciation of the name of the state, in the opinion of this body, is that received by the French from the native Indians and committed to writing in the French word representing the sound. It should be pronounced in three (3) syllables, with the final "s" silent, the "a" in each syllable with the Italian sound, and the accent on the first and last syllables. The pronunciation with the accent on the second syllable with the sound of "a" in "man" and the sounding of the terminal "s" is discouraged by Arkansans.