The Iraqis in this case, wouldn't you say?
The problem with that is that langagues have different phonetic structures. We dutifully spell "Iraq" with a Q because that's how we transliterate that letter in the Arabic alphabet, but we pronounce it as a K. In reality it's a glottal stop, like the T in a Cockney pronunciation of
glass of wa'er. Very few languages have that sound. A great many don't have the H in
Hollands and
Helleniki or the SH in
English and
Schweiz. Most anglophones don't pronounce the CH in "Czech" correctly (and we even have to spell it in Polish because we don't have the Czech diacritical marks).
Whoever gets to be the authority, it certainly won't be the yanks.
The speech of educated Americans is as proper phonetically as that of educated Britons and these days the differences are minor. I've never heard anyone mangle foreign languages like the Brits: the people who make two syllables out of
Juan, with an English affricate J and the accent on the U. And Latin? You've been speaking Latin since the Romans were there to teach it personally and you still can't get the vowels right!
"Congradulations" on being the country least likely to pronounce anything properly.
We say "congrachoolations." You guys can't even hear the phonemes correctly in another dialect of your own language, and you insist that you can do it in a foreign tongue?
It's the phonetic impoverishment of a language that makes it difficult for its speakers to render foreign words. A combination of a limited number of phonemes with stifling rules on how they can be put together. The Japanese take the prize for that: every consonant must be followed by a vowel so "McDonalds" comes out as
Makudonarudo. Chinese is almost as bad but at least they get the fun of choosing from among the eleven kanji for each syllable and coming up with some amusing phrases for foreign names. America is
mei3 guo2, "beautiful country."
yeah well try naming PeoPle from Rossija <---thats the name of the country (and not Russia).
Actually in America we did that during the Cold War. It was pretty common to hear them referred to as Rooskies, which is a fairly faithful rendition of their own name for themselves.
Don't forget that the O in
Rossiya is unaccented so it's not pronounced as an O. It's a [can't get the IPA symbols to display but it's the upside-down V] so the name of the country is ruh-SEE-ya in Russian. We have that sound in English with our unusually rich set of vowels, but most languages don't.
