So this morning Matt Lauer is in Qatar, and I really noticed his pronunciation. I had heard it pronounced to sound like “guitar” with a “k” at the beginning. He pronounced it like “cutter”.
I looked it up on the American Heritage Dictionary, and it lists the “cutter” pronounciation as correct:
So it is great that U.S. media has stopped mispronouncing. Maybe some politicians and journalists in the mainstream U.S. media have always pronounced it correctly and I just need to get out more, but have others noticed this shift and when it began?
I heard a clip on the radio of a senior government official from Qatar and he pronounced it kuh-tar, so I wouldn’t be sure that the U.S. media has previously been wrong.
Well, that’s one down, 191 to go. Or was it only Qatar that bothered you and not the fact that the media does not pronounce France as “fraahns”, Mexico as “meheko”, and Saudi Arabia as “Al Mamlakah al Arabiyah as Suudiyah”?
There are several “correct” pronunciations of Qatar: ku-TAR, gutter, kutter, etc. Even in Qatar, it depends on various factors, including the educational and cultural background of the speaker. The arabic character translated as “Q” has several diferent pronunciations.
So you can’t really say there is one correct pronunciation. This is unremarkable. Strange as it may seem to anal retentives, may words can be correctly pronounced in a number of ways.
I don’t think people are confused by how the “Q” is pronounced. I think the question is about where to put the emphasis.
So, does Qatar officially calls itself QA-tar or qa-TAR?
Foreign incorrect pronunciations aren’t anything new. For example, one country in Europe is pronounced as “JER-muh-nee” in English and “DOITCH-lahnt” locally. I don’t think getting worked up over “Qatar” is any big deal. Even the [t] sound isn’t being prounounced “correctly,” so far as the locals might do.
I heard a prof. on the radio yesterday talking about how to pronounce Qatar.
Emphasis is on the first part QA-tar. Also, the ‘Q’ does not sound like what you would expect, so actually Lauer got it wrong. It sounded to me like a cross between a ‘G’ and a ‘K’.
I think the media knows how to pronounce Quatar. I think they pronounce it as “cutter” because they try to americanize it and are trying to act as though we’ll be more patriotic if we prounounce it the american sounding way. Which to me is ridiculous but maybe ingenious to my next door neighbor.
I’m not sure how, exactly, "cutter’ is any more “American-sounding,” especially since “kuh-TAR” is the only way I’ve ever heard it pronounced. And I don’t really see a trend of “patriotic mispronunciation”; for instance, most news shows seem to have finally stopped saying “I-rack,” thankfully.
Oh? :dubious: There are several Arabic dialects and sociolects, true. However, there is such a thing as Standard Arabic. In Standard Arabic pronunciation, the sound of /q/ is an unvoiced stop, like /k/ but articulated further back.
Consider it this way: the position where you articulate the /k/ in caught is further back from the /k/ in keep. Try saying both of them and note the different positions where the tongue contacts the top of the mouth. So the /q/ sound is like the /k/ in caught, only moved back as far as possible. It articulates at the uvula, at the top of the throat.
Pronouncing it voiced as /g/ is dialectal. Which is fine when you’re hangin’ with the local Arabian homeboys and shooting the down-home colloquial breeze. But an Arab broadcast announcer in any Arab country in the world will use the Standard Arabic pronunciation as much as possible, because that is not tied to any one local dialect, but is universal to the whole Arab world. If you want to know which pronunciation an American announcer should emulate, why I really think he would try to take after his Arabic-speaking counterpart. Do you hear any nationally broadcast American announcers using a southern-fried Georgia dialect? Uh-uh, they all approximate a midwestern “General American” accent, regardless of where they came from. Dan Rather. Walter Cronkite. These are the voices to emulate on the air, even though that doesn’t mean there’s anything “wrong” with down-home Georgia speech. It’s similar with Standard Arabic on the air.
For Americans who are not used to articulating foreign sounds, the nearest substitute of a back /k/ is acceptable. This will sound very similar to “cutter” for all practical purposes.
Except, note one thing: in American English, the intervocalic [t] turns into a voiced flap; it sounds more like /d/. When saying the t in Qatar, imagine it’s at the beginning of a word and it will come out as an unvoiced /t/.
Both vowels are short, and the first syllable is stressed. There is no dispute about this. If you stressed the second syllable, not only would it be wrong Arabic, it would sound like the English word catarrh, which means having a runny nose.
Jomo - as always, you da’ man for all things linguistic - thanks for the thoughtful overview.
Snake Hips (love the name, BTW) - thank you for the link; once again, I thought I searched the archives, but maybe I didn’t go back far enough or sumthin’.
psychonaut - part of me wants to be a little offended at your tone, but I have chosen to let that pass. Having said that, I would differentiate between determining the correct way, in American English, to pronounce a country name vs. the whole “why do they call it Deutschland, while others call it Allemagne or Germany” question. Master Cecil has addressed that one, as have a few threads (you’re welcome to search, I have proven to be deficient browsing the archives), but again, that strikes as a different question altogether - this question is more “okay, we Americans call it Germany, but is it pronounced GERmany or gerMANy?”, if you see my point. You are welcome to offer up your 191 other pronounciation challenges within that context as you need to…
Talking of pronunciation of country names, I only know how annoyed I get when I hear about Antigua in the American media. They invariably get the pronunciation wrong. And being an english speaking country, it’s not like it’s pronounced differently because it’s another language. For all who think it’s pronounced
AN-TIG-U-A
it’s not!
It’s pronounced:
an-TEE-ga
I know it’s only a small country, but I love it and so would you if you ever went there.
I admit I was being facetious with the Saudi Arabia example, but I still fail to see how your peeve with the pronunciation of “Qatar” is any different from the issues regarding the pronunciation of “France”. When foreign words are imported into our vocabulary, people usually make an attempt to spell them in a such a way that the original pronunciation is retained, or at least approximated. Sometimes, as with Chinese and Arabic, they will use a technique known as transliteration, where every character or sound in the source language is mapped to a single letter or letter combination in English; even if that English letter or letter combination does not typically reflect the pronunciation of the original sounds, then at least the conversion will have been unambiguous and readable by people who know the transliteration system used. However, sometimes these foreign words are sufficiently rare that people will encounter them only in writing. And if the word has been transliterated from another writing system, there’s a good chance that most people won’t be familiar with the correspondence of English letters to the sounds of the original language. In these cases, where the English spelling suggests two or more alternative pronunciations, or a single “incorrect” one, one cannot be faulted for making an educated guess. (In fact, there is a linguistic term for this – “spelling pronunciation”.) People pronounce “Qatar” as “kah-TAHR” because the spelling most certainly does not suggest “cutter”, and also because of analogy with similar-looking English and Arabic words they may be familiar with (e.g., “guitar”). Now, I’ll admit that one could always get a native speaker to offer a correct pronunciation, but speakers of the Qatari dialect of Arabic aren’t something one typically has access to at a moment’s notice, even in the newsroom of a major media corporation.
Language is always in the process of changing. When a particular part of it begins to change, people who are used to the old way are often quick to point out what they consider to be a mistake. But by that time, the alternative form is usually so entrenched that it has become an accepted, if not standard, part of the language.
See also the recent GQ thread on the pronunciation of “nuclear”.
