I hear that on the BBC, too.
A more technical term for the different ‘t’ sounds is dental and retroflex. The ‘soft t’ is dental, because the tongue starts at the teeth. Retroflex means the tongue is curled back. The English (at least American, as far as I know) ‘t’ sound is closer to the retroflex, though it’s said to be a bit further back in Urdu and similar languages.
One slightly difficult bit (at least for me as an English native speaker) is that even when full transliteration indications are used, the unadorned ‘t’ is the dental. Retroflex t commonly uses a t with a dot below ( ṭ ). The IPA symbol is ʈ .
Polycarp, Rajasthan is indeed राजस्थान, which has the aspirated dental t (थ), and not theta.
I’ve heard POCK-ih-schtahn a few times on NPR. What kind of pronunciation is that?
You are from Pakistan?
OK. You are not part of the “most of us” I was speaking of.
Yes, actually. During the campaigns in 2008, along with all the OTHER silly tiny things the so-called “liberal” media called Obama out on, he got called on his supposedly snooty, unAmerican pronunciation of Pakistan.
Afghan is indeed the correct term; BUT for Pashtuns whatever their nationality. Afghani means citizen of Afghanistan.
There are two “T” sounds written in the Urdu Nastaliq script, and the “T” sound in Pakistan is the first of them. It’s the fourth letter of the Urdu alphabet. By itself, it looks like a broad shallow U with two dots above it. This is a soft T sound, and we pronounce it in Urdu by putting the tip of the tongue just behind the teeth. The other T is the one that’s usually more difficult for non-natives; for that one you have to put the tip of your tongue up on the top part of your hard palate and kind of flip it forward as you say the T.
Interestingly (and this is really subtle for foreigners) you can often tell higher-education accents from those with lower education because the hard T is much more common in native Urdu speakers with less education speaking English than is a softer T.
If you look at “Pakistan” in a Nastaliq script, that “T” sound is near the left, represented by two little dots and some or all of the full letter depending on how fluidly the whole script has been combined. Here the left side is higher; that’s the “ah” sound addition right before the terminal “n” (noon) sound–the big U with the single dot. (Recall that in Urdu we read right to left…)
پاکستان
I’m wondering if you’re part of most of us. Where do you live?
It is snooty and un-American, whether it’s Obama or a reporter on NPR. He knows very well how 99% of Americans pronounce it, and it’s nothing like “Pocky-stahn”. It’s putting on airs. I bet he didn’t pronounce it that way when he was speaking to the NAACP.
When I hear the president of Pakistan pronounce “America” as “Amedica” I don’t assume he knows nothing about America. I just assume he’s a guy from Pakistan who speaks with an accent. Do we apply a higher standard to Americans? Why? Are we supposed to be smarter?
Tom Tildrum said:
You think Americans pronounce France funny, what about Germany.
Americans say Ger’ muhn ee
Germans say Deutschland.
That’s about the silliest thing I’ve ever read here. Seriously. I didn’t understand then and still don’t why Obama’s pronunciation of Pakistan is such a hot-button. Do you have to pronounce English like a back-country hick to be a real American?
I heard Tom Twetten, formerly a major CIA officer in the region, speak last winter. Invariably he referred not only to *Pockeeston, *but to the Pockeeston Tahleebon.
And we call some of the Germans over here “Pennsylvania Dutch”!
“…tally me banana…”
Um. This is a joke, right? 12.5% of the population of the US is made up of immigrants…and that’s not counting tourists, and Americans traveling abroad.
Anyway. This is kind of a subjective thing. There are times when I find the “American” pronunciation of foreign places absolutely grating (eye-ran, eye-rack), and times when I find Americans pronouncing foreign names like they speak the local language eye-rollingly pretentious (people who pronounce “Budapest” as “Budapesht”, looking at you). I personally find Obama’s pronunciation of Pakistan to be okay, but if he started attempting a local pronunciation of “Afghanistan” (that “gh” sound is not a sound we have in English) I’d probably find it irritating.
ghost
ghirardelli
ghoul
Is this a trick question?
.
That’s not how the “gh” in “Afghanistan” is pronounced by Afghanis.
I ghuess you’re right, there is a slight variation but it’s probably not discernible by Americans.
Well, I’m an American and it’s pretty discernible to me. It practically sounds like “Afhwanistan”.