Just kidding. In an amusing post yesterday on Passport, Blake Hounshell noticed a draft of President Bush’s speech to the UN contained some phonetic guides to pronunciation:
* Kyrgyzstan [KEYR-geez-stan]
* Mauritania [moor-EH-tain-ee-a]
* Harare [hah-RAR-ray]
* Mugabe [moo-GAH-bee]
* Sarkozy [sar-KO-zee]
* Caracas [kah-RAH-kus]
Of course, while these phonetic guides didn’t help him with “kerzigstan,” he did apparently trill the “r” in “Perrru” nicely (I won’t touch the Aung San Suu Kyi partial gaffe, as that one is understandably difficult, so to speak).
The really interesting part, though is how darkly defensive White House Press Secretary Dana Perino got when asked about it. President Bush is not a baby, and if he blows the names of countries the way he blows basic words like “nookyoolar,” I don’t see where the offense comes in. Fatigue, maybe, at the constant focus on his disfluencies (though this is a trait he apparently shares with French President Nicolas Sarkozy), but offense is a bit much.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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Well, at least he got the first and last syllables of Kyrgyzstan sounding a little better than the cheatsheet pronunciation.
Being an academic, pedantic kind of guy, the old way of spelling it (Kirghizstan) in Latin is much closer to how it should sound.
I agree. Kirghizstan is much better. It’s only because the ы in Russian is always transliterated as ‘y’, even though in Kazakh and Kyrgyz, it isn’t the ы sound. I mean, it’s much closer to ‘ih’ or the german e with the umlaut, in my opinion. When English-speakers see a ‘y’ by itself, it is usually open to debate. EEE? IH? AY?
Russians have a hard time, too, because they see the ы and end up saying it like the Russian vowel, instead of its somewhat-easier-to-pronounce Kazakh/Kyrgyz variant. [Qazaq and Kirghiz, I mean]
Related to this, I have to say my favorite parts of books covering Central Asia are the paragraphs, or sometimes who pages, devoted to the author’s defense of their specific choice of spelling conventions, and how the reader who view them. Kabul? Cabool? Samarqand? Samarcand? Samarkand? Oozbeg? Uzbek? O’zbek? The fun never ends!
The worst part is that in most languages, there are various words with similar spellings and sounds with vastly different meanings [qiz, qo'z, kuz being 3 examples in Uzbek - girl, eye, and autumn] for non-native speakers to trip over. Makes me wonder if with our academic debates over spelling we’re unwittingly changing the “City of Dreams” to the “Slum of Beggars,” or worse, the “Half-knotted Seagull.”
Samarqand? Samarcand? Samarkand?
A pox on them all! Marakanda is the only acceptable spelling!
And what would make me very happy right now is to see a photo or drawing of a half-knotted seagull.
Remarkably, “half-knotted seagull” gets zero hits in Google.
Actually it should be ‘gull’ not ‘seagull’.
It kind of pisses me off that our country is giving in to this global understanding crap. In the good ol’ days we could pronouce a countries name anyway we wanted, if a bunch of little people babbling in their gobbilty-goop langauge didn’t like it then big whoop.
Of course I’m joking (not about the gull thing though).
I was going to say “gull not seagull” too
(But I’ve not seen one out here in the plains yet…)
And I thought you were serious, what with the “eye-talian” stuff.
Thanks for the link. Just an FYI, it’s “Blake Hounshell,” not Blake Nolan.
No problem — that’ll teach me to read four things at once. Sorry for the mistype!
It’d probably be too much to point out that Bush’s pronunciation of “nuclear” is fine. In fact, one can find the phonetics of his pronunciations in at least one dictionary I know, and it is well represented amongst several English dialects. It’s neither a mistake nor representative of an idiolect. But that’s never going to stop people who think they know things about language from saying so.
Just so you know the linguistics of why his pronunciation has crept into a good deal of the English speech community, consider the position of your mouth and tongue at [k] and the energy it takes to get from there to [l] so quickly. Inserting the YA is easier on the speaker. It’s really a question of economy for the speaker, and one can find it all over the place. Instead of pronouncing each part of “you” after a word like “don’t,” for instance, one might really pronounce something that comes out like “doncha.”
If you’re going to criticize the President, you’re WAY better off sticking to his foreign policy. It’s not like it’s hard.
However much I appreciate the finer phonetics discussion on this, and the topic IS facinating, I think that the bottom line here is simply that the US president – the leader of the free world (!) – is an illiterate, un-educated fool.
Remember when the then-national security advisor Condi Rice first time briefed the president on Central Asia…. “Stan who?” was his question….
Suddenly a lot of what has happened since makes more ‘sense’…..