The NYT published an article yesterday on the correct pronunciation of Qatar. I am all in favor of helping people understand how to pronounce unfamiliar names from unfamiliar parts of the world. This is a worthy goal. It helps, however, to get one's facts straight.
The article tells us that the first sound in Qatar is produced by the glottis, requiring the speaker to lift the very back of the tongue up to the roof of the mouth. Unfortunately, the two halves of that sentence are anatomically incompatible.
Let's go with the second half: lift the very back of your tongue up to your uvula, the dangly part of your soft palate. Briefly stop the airflow. You'll notice that the sound is a cousin of our /k/ sound, but it's not the same.
It is also not the same as a glottal sound. Gently pinch the middle front of your neck with your thumb and index finger, and swallow. Did you feel your larynx rise and then sink again? Your glottis is in the middle of your larynx. It's the space between your true vocal folds. You use it to make the /h/ sound, and you use it to stop the airflow in the middle of "uh-oh."
The NYT tells us that the glottis is "a muscle English speakers don't get to exercise much," a phrase that is about 12 different flavors of wrong. You reconfigure your glottis all the dang time and have been doing so since you were a wee tiny palm-sized fetus. You do it by coordinating the movements of a bunch of different muscles, not just one. You manipulate your glottis around the clock, because you have to keep your saliva out of your airway even while you are sleeping, and protecting the lower airway is the primary reason you have a glottis. Seriously, that is the silliest thing I've read in the NYT in a while, even though I slipped up and read part of a David Brooks column last week.
Thus far the reporter is responsible for the silliness, but even the Arabic instructor she is quoting says some questionable stuff. The initial draft of this post enumerated more of my objections (the head tilt! the "hollow" T!), but I am thinking a streamlined version might be more palatable. (Palatable! Ba-dum-CHING! I'll be here all week.)
Here's the TL;DR: this is the not the first time the NYT has fallen flat in its efforts to tell readers how to use their articulators. Paging the NYT: if you need a nitpicky editorial consultant for your articles about language, my rates are reasonable. And, bonus, I know where the glottis is.
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