Like fountain? I pondered this, and found fountain a bit of an outlier as far as English pronunciation regularity is concerned. Intuitively, I opted for an anglicized version of a French/romanicized name (it's not common in France, as far as I can tell) and imagined it as (you don't do unicode, so I won't try IPA) [pUn'teIn]. Well, I commented even though I don't know for sure.

Well, I'm going by 1) general Sprachgefühl; 2) the analogy of the surname Pount(e)ney, which is definitely pronounced POUNT-ni ("pount" rhyming with "fount"); and 3) my vivid memory of my embarrassment at discovering that the name of the great science fiction editor and writer Anthony Boucher was pronounced BOU-cher and not (as I had Francophilically assumed) boo-SHAY. But I have no actual evidence.

I enjoy comparing my Sprachgefühl with others', for fine-tuning purposes.

So, where we are boring, the ancients were 'horing.

Damn. Born too late. Again.

In HS my son mentioned Beloit [belwa] college in Wisconsin during his college search. There are lots of those place names in the midwest -- near my home there was a a Lake called "L'Homme Dieu" [LeHOMadoo]. I believe that many of them are authentic relics of early settlement -- Minnesota was French during much of the XVIIIc, and still had a considerable French pupulation in 1860.

"Study French! and learn how to mispronounce common American names!"

I've seen a map where Lousiana met Quebec in Minnesota.