It's not "Ahk-med"

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Media broadcasters are forever butchering this Arab name, which is commonly transliterated into English as Ahmed or sometimes Ahmad. Announcers often say “Ahk-med” or even “Ach-med” (like the German pronunciation of Bach). I don’t know where they get that.

There is no K sound or throat scraping in this name. It is pronounced Ah-med where there is little unvoiced puff of air that comes out at the end of the Ah. Despite many difficult sounds in Arabic, this one is not out of reach of most English speakers.

This isn’t a flame so it’s not in BBQ; hope it helps to stamp out ignorance.

2

[Carson] I did not know that. [/Carson]

Thanks. I’ve been mangling that (on rare occasion) for years.

3

Well, the spelling “Achmed” probaly makes people lean that way. suspect German influence myself. I’ll bet we got this from some German translation of something Arabic, and to them it seemed a natural transliteration, but it’s screwed up English pronunciation ever since, just like “Scheherazade” has (In my translations direct from the original, the name is given as something like “Sharzahd”). Besides which, we’ve heard that there are a lot of gutturals in Arabic. Not having structions on how to pronounce it, one opts for pseudo-German Ach-met, or else for American “I’ll make the closest stab with the letters we actually pronounce” Ak-met.
Interesting to find out that they’re both wrong. Many thanks.

4

Also? “Saddam” is not pronounced “sa-DAHM”. It’s “sa-DAAM”.

5

I don’t know about you, but I pronounce ‘aa’ the same as ‘ah’ Both are AAAAA.

6

I am not sure this is correct. I see a lot of conflicting accounts.

http://www.overspun.com/?p=1705

http://www.radioislam.org/historia/zionism/media_myopia.html

7

http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/people/A0802835.html
And in the interest of being difficult.

http://www.factmonster.com/ce6/people/A0824831.html

http://names.voa.gov/DailyAction.cfm

8

Count me among the clueless. I went to school with a boy who prounounced it Ahmed but the guy down the street who’s family owns a restaurant I frequent introduced himself to me as “Ach-med.”

::::shrug::::

9

Dammit, I meant to also add that my understanding was that the /k/ sound was like the sound when correctly prounouncing the yiddish “chutzpah” it’s not a hard /k/ but more throaty.

Pardon my lack of linguistic terminology, it’s been years and years since I studied it.

10

Okay, the way I mean it is.

aa = a in rat or cat
ah = a in far or car

In the name “Saddam”, the second a is a “aa” sound, but held longer than we usually would in English. “Sadaaaaaam”.

11

When I was little, we had a German Shepherd named Achmed (it means “dark one”), and we pronounced it the right way (ACH-med, closer to ACH-mit).

When I got older, I heard people saying Ahk-med and never even realized they were talking about the same name.

12

So it’s almost “Sa-damn?” I’m probably never going to get this right.

This reminds me of a thread we had a few months ago about incorrectly ‘Frenchifying’ j sounds in Hindu. Anybody else have corrections like that?

13

I’m going to have to ask for qualifications and confirmation from an expert in Arabic.

IIIoFI: A “Hindu” is someone who adheres to the Hindu religion. “Hindi” is a language. The set of Hindus and the set of speakers of Hindi are overlapping but not identical. Also, Hindi is only one of the many native languages of India. I think the phrase you were looking for is “in Indian words and names.”

14

Let us know what you find out. My wife is Egyptian, and I’ll allow that almost all the Ahmeds I’ve met have been Egyptians. There could be some regional variation.

15

Well, I"m hoping you’ll know about it as soon as I do. That was apparently too roundabout a way of asking for confirmation from someone else here who has displayed some knowledge about Arabic. (Johanna?)

16

I have a dark blue Betta (fish) named Ahmed.
I pronounce it Ahh-med, but I believe there’s regional differences as mentioned. I lived in Turkey and heard it pronounced Ach-med too.
I also have a red Betta named Pierre. Pronounced Pee-air.

17

That’s how my Arabic professor pronounced it. I didn’t take it long enough to become an expert myself, but he seemed to know what he was about.

18

:smiley:

19

I meant Hindi and not Hindu, yes. It was your thread, actually. You didn’t specify if it was Indian words in general or the Hindi language, since the real topic was foreign words.

20

CookingWithGas and Kyla are both right about the pronunciation.

It would be so cool if we could all post phonetic discussions in IPA to avoid confusion. But I don’t know if the characters are all available to all browsers, using Unicode or what. The Character Map in Accessories > System Tools does provide a lot of them.

The low open mid-front vowel you’re talking about (as in dam, damn) is /æ/. It’s true as you said, Kyla, the long vowel in Arabic is usually this sound lengthened [æ:], although this phoneme can also have a different allophone [a:] depending on its consonantal environment. Nitpick: the d is doubled, so it ends the first syllable and also begins the second syllable: sad-DAM.

The first vowel in Saddām is short and the second is long. The sound of the first short a, because of the consonant it follows, is pronounced like uh, so the first syllable sounds about the same as in “sudden.” Followed by “damn.”

In what language?

That’s the right way in what language?

The meaning of Ahmad in Arabic is ‘more praised’. The name Mahmud means ‘praised’, so the comparative form Ahmad means ‘more praised’. Does that make sense? The concept of “praise” is carried by the triliteral root H-M-D which also forms names like Muhammad or Hammād.

The sound of this H does not occur in English. Arabic has two /h/ phonemes: one is the same sound as English /h/. This is the h in Mahdi, for example. But the H in Ahmad, Muhammad, etc. is an unvoiced pharyngeal sound. It is produced by tightly narrowing the pharynx (in the middle of the throat) and exhaling audibly through that narrowed opening, with a sort of hissing sound. Learning how to pronounce this, and its homologous sound ‘ayn, for the first time is an exercise in using speech muscles that one had never been aware of before.

The sound of kh is never correct for Ahmad in Arabic, although in colloquial Uzbek the sound of h followed by a consonant sometimes changes to kh (IPA /x/). For example, the Uzbek word for “thank you” is rahmat (originally the Arabic word for mercy), but is often pronounced “rakhmat.” My co-worker from Samarqand always says “rakhmat” when we talk in Uzbek. I suspect this may be a Russian influence. Russian lacks the sound of /h/ and so substitutes /x/. Khello, khow are you? Students of Central Asian languages come up against Russian mispronunciations all the time. It’s worse than Anglo Americans trying to pronounce “hombre.”