Re: OFF-TOPIC: Misspoken... Sort Of

>Just curious, how do people say 'Iraq'? I say [ir\ak]. And 'Qatar'? I say
>[k@'tar\]. People on CNN say [air\&k] or [ir\&k] and [k&tar\], and you have
>to wonder, why hasn't anyone ever bothered to correct them?
It's the ['AI)r&k] (and ['AI)r&n]) pronunciation that irks me. But I listen
to (Standard) Arabic-language internet radio news broadcasts on occasion,
and I hear this pronunciation: [?\Ei)'rA:q]. Pharyngeal, uvular and emphatic
consonants tend to lower the vowels /i/ and /u/ to [e] and [o], and back /&/
to [A] (or [V]?).

Someone once said that the local (i.e. Gulf Arabic) pronunciation of Qatar
is ['GVt_eVr], with a voiced uvular stop. Maybe it's unvoiced, but emphatic
voiceless stops consonants are unaspirated while non-emphatic voiceless
stops are aspirated in Arabic, generally. And to me, an unaspirated
voiceless stop doesn't sound very different than its voiced counterpart, me
being an Anglophone and all.

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