I get irritated (my bar is obviously low) whenever I hear a government official or news person pronounce Qatar as if it rhymed with butter. How did this mispronunciation get started? It should be pronounced Kuh-TAR. That’s how that country’s inhabitants pronounce it and how I learned it way back in grade school.
@johnldeboer Wow, I always pronounced it Kuh-TAR, guessing by analogue with other words transliterated from Arabic. Then I heard butter everywhere on TV and "realized" I'd been doing it wrong.😥
@walterbays No, you had it right. I still don’t know how “Cutter” came into being. What’s next - “Quite” for Kuwait?
@johnldeboer I suspect it came about at the US military base there. Why, I have no idea. Then news correspondants reporting on the Gulf war picked it up from them, then picked it up from one another, then spread it everywhere.