I think this is a good point. English has many names for places that don’t “match” the name native speakers use. This is OK, and when speaking English you should (probably) use the English word. It would sound a bit odd for an English speaker to start talking about their upcoming trip to Duetschland.
This has become a bit of an issue lately, however, with more than one country expressing an interest in English speakers (or at least international bodies) using different words for places (Mombai/Bombay, Turkey/Türkiye, The Ukraine/Ukraine).
I don’t think it’s a bad thing to try to get latinized versions of middle-Eastern countries as close as possible without relying on phonemes that don’t exist in English. So probably something like “cutter” (with even stress on each syllable) is the best a native English speaker, when speaking English, should hope/attempt to do.
When Claudia Sheinbaum was elected as President of Mexico, Jon Stewart said he looked forward to hearing every newscaster insist on pronouncing her name “Clow-oo-dee-ah” [over-the-top Jerry Lewis voice] “SHINE-BAOHOOOOM!”
I’ve always pronounced it identically to the word catarrh (an old-school term for inflammation of the nasal cavity or the like).
One time during rounds when I was in vet school, I said that a horse had some catarrhal discharge from its nostrils (i.e., snot). The clinician said, “isn’t that a country?”
So do you think that in the future we might see English speakers referencing “Misr”?
Also, while we’re on this topic - why DOES English sub out all the Hebrew Y’s for J’s? Jerusalem, Jesus, Jericho, etc. Hebrew doesn’t even have a J sound (in modern Hebrew, loan words like Giraffe are spelled with a ג with an apostrophe).
I think Indiana Jones talks about this while solving a puzzle in Last Crusade, but I forget his explanation.
Well, no, not unless the government of Egypt makes a push. Because the word “Egypt”, as I understand it, isn’t an attempt to latinize the Arabic name but rather is a different name from an entirely different source (Greek, I believe).
It’s much more like the Germany/Duetschland example where the English word is from an entirely different source. English speakers should stick with Germany and Egypt when speaking English.
Qatar is an attempt to latinize the same word that natives use for the country, so I think English speakers should attempt to get as close to that pronunciation as their phonemic set will allow. Saying something like “kwatter” would be obviously wrong and probably should be corrected. Same with “Kay-TAR”. But either “kuh-TAR” or “kuh-tter” are probably close enough to be “correct” English.
Sorry for not using IPA… and all just MHO of course.
@Alessan : There is a trend in contemporary English to re-borrow foreign words. The historic English names of places are being abandoned, and new English words are being invented by simply using the original language’s spelling, but as English speakers. What we haven’t done, and won’t do, is get anywhere close as to the original language’s pronunciation. As I’m writing this, the poster above mentioned Kiev (mispronounced Russian) changing to Kyiv (mispronounced Ukrainian).
“Corunna” is now “A Coruña”; “Turin” is now “Torino.” It’s harder for us to do that with languages like Arabic or Hebrew whose script we can’t read, but somehow we manage.
I believe the English spelling and pronunciation is derived from Latin transliteration of the Semitic glyphs via French (which is the major Romance language to impact English). The modern Romance languages are where the distinction between /j/ (“yuh” sound) and /dʒ/ (“juh” sound, the letter “jay”) first became expresses as distinct glyphs “I” or “J”, it seems.
I don’t know why the “juh” sound was picked for the English place names in the area. Perhaps a bias against starting words with a dual-vowel sound?
When John Edward had that show where he (fake) read people’s ghosts, or whatever you want to call it, I had a fantasy:
He always started with "I’m being asked to acknowledge N [or T, or M, or J, or some other common first letter of a name]. Then he’d narrow it down to the Matthew or Jack who was in a car accident, and that was the cause of death, and it was unexpected, and the person there wasn’t prepared, and it’s been hard, blah, blah.
I always wanted to be there one night when he was getting a lot of hits, and got braver, and asked for “someone who died young,” or something. I’d raise my hand, then when he tried to get the first letter, he’d go through the whole alphabet, and then I say it was my friend Yekaterina, beginning with a “Ye,” a letter that doesn’t exist in English, or even better, my friend Chaiim, whose name begins with a “chai” the first letter of Chanukah.
Yes, it’s a sound change that happened in English. Latin /j/ (“y” as in “yes”) became French /ʒ/ (“zh” as in the “si” in “Persian” or French “j” as in “jour”) became English /dʒ/ (“j” as in “judge”) so Latin Ierusalem got re-spelled as Jerusalem once J was invented, and the pronunciation shifted slowly from Latin > French > English without ever checking in with Hebrew (or Greek, for that matter: see also Jesus).
The pronunciation I mostly hear in the news is like the word “cutter.” In American English, the general rule seems to be to use American English phonemes to approximate the word—with the exception of a few extra phonemes that get used, like the the tap or rolled R and such.
That’s what I do when non-cheeseheads try to pronounce Wisconsin town names.
At least, due to this thread I learned why foreign words were spelled wrong. But, still, I mean, for a non-latin based alphabet, transliteration can be…anything. So why couldn’t the country in question be spelled in English as “Cutta”? Or if you want to make it more “exotic”, use “Kutta”. Looks sufficiently foreign. But Qatar looks to me like it should be pronounced “Kay TAR”, which does no one any good.
And “Deutchland” is perfectly pronounceable by English speakers, so why not use it, over all?
I used to spend a lot of time in Malaysia. Their language was transliterated by the British. “How are you?” Is spelled “Apa Khabar” (or something like that) but the last word is pronounced more like “Kah Bah”. Say it in most British accents where the final r is soft and it makes sense.
OK, but, to reiterate, if you think you are supposed to pronounce an English word (with all that implies), you are proceeding under a false assumption.
Just pick one of the ways the Youtube guy recommends saying it.
Because “Germany” came first? The land was called “Germania” long before the Germans themselves had a name for it.
Remember, names change, and they aren’t just changed by outsiders. Languages evolve, and names evolve with them. Take the Roman city of Neapolis in southern Italy. Over the years, the name evolved in English into “Naples”; but at the same time, it also evolved in Italian, into “Napoli”. So what’s the name of the city, Naples or Napoli? Technically speaking, both of them are equally wrong.
Oh, and the people who actually live there? They call it “Napule”.
I think it quickly gets political. Like, you may have noticed that Serbian and Croatian seem to use different alphabets. Or, how do you want to pronounce and spell Burma?