The World Cup has gotten underway. I enjoy soccer. I played the game many years ago and I still enjoy watching it, and the World Cup generally produces some pretty good games. Well worth watching.
Much has been said about non-soccer related issues around these games, which I won’t get into here. And I won’t get into what I think of the governing body for the sport, which certainly has a number of problems they should also be dealing with.
But one thing I have been trying to figure out, how do you really pronounce the name of the host country?
There seems to be a few options, and we tend to hear all of them as the World Cup is being discussed. You wouldn’t think five little letters would be so confusing, but they sure seem to be.
So I turned to the Google machine to try to figure out the proper way to say Qatar. You could almost see the smoke start coming out of it’s little computer chips. The truth seems to be, if you don’t know Arabic, you’re probably going to get it wrong. You just hope to get close.
The issue is the fact the Arabic and English are very different languages. Sounds are not the same. In Arabic, the name of Qatar is written using three symbols. Two of those three symbols have no equivalents amoung our alphabet. They just do not exist.
This isn’t unusual. While we might like to think we can match things up, it is often not the case and happens when translating things back and forth between a lot of languages. They don’t always match. There are differences in the way the sounds are made. Different places you put your tongue while speaking that make sounds often defy translation. Which is something that can often confound us to no end.
I came across several rather long articles explaining this. It’s rather interesting, but the best way to some it up seems to be that there are a few ways we pronounce Qatar that people from Qatar find quite acceptable. But most of them will be wrong.
Saying it similar to then word guitar is okay. But so is saying it similar to cutter. And there are several variations between the two. But no matter which variation you try, the two syllables should both have equal stress.
There area lot of examples to help. Some of them may even come close. But it isn’t easy.
So I think I’ll take a break and just watch a game.
But that raises another question. Why do we call it soccer and not football?
