PS: I also “chewed out” the TV news organization for their laughable pronunciation of the Spanish letter J. MA3ndi, stress on 1st syllable (Saudi) and ma3nDEESH, stress on 2nd syllable (Egypt). Verb stress is the trickiest of all, of course. Saudis, for example, will say MAdrasa with the stress on the 1st syllable MA, whereas Egyptians have the stress on the 2nd syllable maDRAsa.

Stress in Arabic dialects is also crucial and quite tricky. You can mess up the pronunciation of individual letters and still be understood, but if you get the STRESS wrong, (even if you have the sounds right), you cut down your understanding level by at least 50%) (Linguistically speaking, syllable stress makes a huge difference in most languages in getting native speakers to understand you. I can’t expect these newscaster to be able to pronounce the Arabic Qaf or the hard Ta, but it seems to me they should at least stress the correct syllable. Most, however, were pronouncing it KatAAR, with the accent on the final syllable like in the English word guiTAR (although Southerners – people who live in the deep South of the USA – will often say GEEtar with the accent on the first syllable.) In one specific case, the guy was pronouncing it like the English word GUTTER, you know, that channel on the sides of roads that carries off rainwater and other things. Yesterday, I emailed a TV news organization “complaining” about how their newscasters were pronouncing Qatar.

How to you pronounce qatar