(Don’t want this to be a political thread. That’s just my wish. Whichever happens, I’m sure Mods will relocate, as necessary)
Really.
How is this name of this country pronounced?
Do Qatar-ians say it similiarly?
And, how is it supposed to be spelled?
In Standard Arabic, the name is pronounced [ˈqɑtˤɑr], while in the local dialect, Gulf Arabic, it is [ˈɡɪtˤɑr].[15] English speakers use different approximate pronunciations as the Arabic pronunciations use sounds not present in English.[36]
I have heard it claimed that it is pronounced fairly close to the English word “gutter”.
According to Wiki,
In Standard Arabic, the name is pronounced [ˈqɑtˤɑr], while in the local dialect, Gulf Arabic, it is [ˈɡɪtˤɑr].[15] English speakers use different approximate pronunciations as the Arabic pronunciations use sounds not present in English.[36]
The tˤ is an “emphatic and pharyngealized /t/” whatever that means and comments there no equivalent sound in English.
Ed: Ninja’d.
Why “huh?” Do you mean how is it spelled in the Arabic alphabet? That would be QTR (would it help if I used the Arabic forms of the letters?)
How the locals say it… they have their own accent (like q → g); maybe watch this video a couple of minutes in: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=utP3PbWHZrU
Trying to map it into English as in naturally spoken by someone speaking English with an English accent (or American, for that matter) is not really going to work
I heard a guy on the the news say gutter, it didn’t seem right.
I looked and saw, Qatarians are actually Qataris.
Nice.
I always heard it as Guitar but with a C. But I dunno.
As a speaker of a Semitic language, I generally tell people not to try to pronounce consonants and vowels that are outside their wheelhouse - you won’t be able to do it properly, there’s a risk you’ll sound like an idiot, and even if you do say it correctly, changing accent mid-sentence always sounds wrong. Just pronounce it KAH-tahr.
Hmm. Not sure I can agree or disagree with @Alessan.
Worst case scenario interpretation of that comment is, “Hey dumbshit, you can’t possibly be expected to pronounce my language correctly, so don’t even try - just pronounce it in your obviously ignorant way, and then me and my native-speaking ever-so-superior friends will laugh at you behind your back.”
Medium case scenario, if everyone is cool and no one is ever offended or rolls their eyes at the mispronunciation, life goes on. Native speakers take note of the accent/mispronunciation of outsiders, but tolerate it with limited or no condescension.
Best case, there is an actual understanding that different languages have different names/pronunciations for the same thing, even proper nouns. Like “Indonesia.” If I’m speaking English, I say it one way. If I’m speaking the Indonesian language, I say it differently. No one judges my accent regardless of how it sounds, because inevitably there will be variation. Same country, different labels. Germany, Deutchland, Allemagne, Jerman, etc.
When I lived in Egypt and tried to learn Arabic (both MSA and vernacular Egyptian), all of us native English speakers struggled with consonants that don’t exist in English. But we tried our best, to much encouragement and appreciation from the local native Arabic speakers. No one ever said to me, “don’t try to pronounce consonants and vowels outside your wheelhouse - you won’t be able to do it properly, and you’ll sound like an idiot if you do.” I’ve have been devastated and discouraged if they had.
ETA: In Egypt, our native English-speaking attempts to say “Qatar” did indeed sound a bit like “gutter.” One American recounted how he had a high school teacher in Mississippi who told his students about a country called “Kway-tar.” We all agreed that while that teacher might have technically needed a pronunciation lesson, it was encouraging that at least he wanted his students to know there was a world out there, with countries whose names might be hard to pronounce.
You misunderstand me. I have no problem at all when people try to pronounce words properly when speaking a language - in your case, Arabic. What I don’t like is when people do it while speaking a different language, like English. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been annoyed by American tourists telling me that they’re going to “YerushaLAAAAyim”. Just say Jerusalem, dude. You’ll make it easier for all of us.
I grew up in a bilingual household, which means that I’m sensitive to varying pronunciation. Take, for example, this imagined conversation that could have occurred in my parents’ home, back when they were alive:
Me: “So what are you guys doing tonight?”
My dad: “Oh, your mom and I are driving up to Haifa for a concert.”
My little brother, entering the room: “?לאן אתם נוסעים” (Where are you going?)
My dad, switching to Hebrew: “לחיפה. יש איזה משהו בקונסרבטוריון” (*To Haifa. There’s this thing at the Conservatory").
Note that my dad used the word “Haifa” twice in the conversation. The first time he said it, he pronounced it “Haifa”, with an H, because he was speaking English. The second time, though, he pronounced it “Khaifa”, with a voiceless uvular fricative, because that’s how it’s said in Hebrew. Shifting between the two pronunciations was automatic to us.
Context is everything. The way I see it, when speaking Arabic, pronounce it as close as you can to how Arabic speakers would; when speaking English, though, stick to the sounds used in the English language.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that you should do something like pronounce Iraq “I-rack”. Pronouncing it “E-rock” is just as easy to an English speaker.
When my husband was serving in Iraq, and had R&R in Qatar, all the Americans called it kah-TAR.
On the news, I keep hearing KAY-ter, just like “cater,” as in “catered affair.”
I don’t know how off the first one was, but my gut says the newscasters are dead wrong.
Kiev isn’t pronounced “KEEV” either.
That makes me recall a friend back during my undergrad who insisted on pronouncing place names the way they were pronounced in the language of the place. In our college caf, he regaled us of his adventures in Munchen, Paree, Roma, Athenai. And then, there was the time he told us about visiting Moskva.
As for me, I do recall taking Russian and as all us English-speakers who were learning Russian did, tripped over the pronunciation of the “ы” letter. Yes, though it looks like it is two characters, it is a single letter, pronounced somewhere between “ee” and “oi.” I finally got it, as did my classmates, but having to pronounce “ы” in a Russian name would have thrown my “Munchen, Paree, Roma, etc.” friend completely off.
I see @Alessan’s point about injecting bad accent or poor pronunciation where it doesn’t really fit.
I am generally uninformed about real Arabic pronunciation, but understand that Qatar is properly close to “cutter” or better yet “CUT-tə” with an almost schwa ending and with a rather different “t” sound unfamiliar to English speakers. OK. ISTM saying “CUT-tə” English style with some effort to de-emphasize the “t” is at least better than saying “kah-TAR” with the accent at the wrong end of a very small word and emphasising the “r” sound at the end that the word doesn’t actually have. The latter seems like deliberate butchery.
I recall during the Falklands / Malvinas conflict that UK Prime Minister Thatcher always refered to the enemy government as the “Ar-jen-TINE JUN-ta” with the “ine” rhyming with “wine” and the “J” as in “jungle”. Sorry Maggie, that makes you sound uninformed and/or jingoistic, not like a wise and resolute head of state.
My punchline: aim in the general direction of native or at least textbook pronunciation, not off into space. But try to avoid the affectation of sounds you just can’t reach.
The sound [tˤ] is a pharyngealized t, meaning you say [t] while constricting the pharynx. It makes a fatter sound with a deeper resonance that way. But never mind about it when speaking English. Alessan’s advice is best. Just use ordinary English phonemes. To use Arabic pronunciation, we’d have to get into the difference between Modern Standard Arabic and the local Qatari dialect, and for that you’d need to know when to code-switch to MSA and when to code-switch to dialect, depending on the circumstances. If you don’t want to get into all that, stick with plain English phonemes. You’re not expected to produce the sounds [q] and [tˤ] in English. If you go around saying “gutter” or “guitar” nobody will know what you mean anyway.
As with other threads on such matters, IMHO the main problem lies with those who first started spelling these names in the Latin alphabet. It seems apparent to me that a lot of foreign words and names have ways that could be spelled closer to their native pronunciation* than what was initially chosen. One of the most well known is Bombay / Mumbai. If Mumbai is closer to the correct pronunciation, why did they just not go with Mumbai in the first place? Same with Qatar. It seems obvious that there are better ways to spell it in English, so why did the first translators choose that particular spelling?
The first thing I noticed about Qatar when I first saw the name of the country years ago is that, as far as I know, every word we have in native English that begins with a “Q” has a “u” after the “Q”.
When I flew on Qatar Airways, the staff pronounced it close to the English word cutter, with the emphasis on the first syllable.
But God help you if you mispronounce “Qantas”…
Yeah, this. Plus, it’s very strange how some words are overemphatically pronounced like that (you see it a lot with Qatar and Gaza, both of which are almost always horribly mispronounced when attempted).
On the other hand, you never hear Egypt called “Misr” or Jerusalem called “Yerushalaim”…
It’s just a matter of which random words have become trendy to… I don’t want to say “virtue” signal, but it’s very similar. But rather than signaling that you hold the right belief, you’re signaling that you are some kind of regional expert because you know how to (mis)pronounce guttural vowels.
Yes, one of the few things we were accurately taught in elementary school. “U” always follows “Q” in native English words. You will see it in foreign borrowings from Arabic, Chinese, and Hebrew mainly, usually in alternative spellings for words like kat or Koran, chi, and Kabbalah. (Qat, Qur’an, qi, and Qabbalah, respectively.) Note that all these are from languages that do not use the Roman alphabet. Oh, and Qing dynasty comes to mind. Also note the q does not represent the same sound in all the examples.
British dopers can correct me, but I think itis typical for loan words in UK English to be pronounced mopre phonetically then they are in US English-- eg, they say “fillet,” (as in, "fill it up) for “filet,” while in the US it is fi-LAY, closer (somewhat) to French, and giving us the past tense “fileted,” pronounced “fi-LAYD.”
There is actually a reason for this. 18th century explorers, sociologists, anthropologists, what have you, went out from Europe, and into areas of the world that Europeans previously know very little about.
In order to support their work (in part-- they also had government grants, and sometimes money from the church, if they promised to spend a little time encouraging the heathen to attend church), they wrote reports on what they were doing, penning articles for journals, and printing pamphlets for selling at newsstands.
They’d bring with them a single printing press, with a single set of letters, designed for printing English. In other words, tons of lowercase Es, not to many uppercase Xs
When they got to transliterating large numbers of foreign words, they kept running out of the less common letters, and finding they had other letters they didn’t use at all.
So they made choices like, in language X, capital M will stand for the B-sound in the first position in a transliterated word. Or, since N and G always are together in that order, N does not appear alone, and neither does the hard-G sound, then lowercase g will stand for the sound “ng.” Hence, Pago Pago is pronounced Pango, Pango. Why G and not N? N is something like the 5th most common letter, and if you had to, you could slip in a lowercase q for a g if you ran out of lowercase Gs.
Pamphlets came with explanations and pronunciation guides, but people ignored them, so in addition to Pago Pago, we got Bombay, Peking, and the Moslems.
We could have started reforming spellings in the days of linotype, but it wasn’t the right political climate. It just began in the late 80s, which, interestingly, was when there was a major shift in ASL to dump all the old signs for other nations, and adopt all those other nations signs for themselves. Some of thew old ones were pejorative, some just silly, but at any rate, it just seemed right.
Sorry for getting off topic.