The past two days, I have heard several news people to Niger, as Ni-jheer.

Was it always pronounced like a French word? Like Steve Colbert chose late in life to make his name sound French, pronouncing it Kol-baer.

Inquiring minds want to know. I just always pronounced it Ni-geer.

Sounds kind of fancy if they call it ni-jheer.

No it has not...much like the Camp Lejune bullshit here in NC a year back...som crackhead said "Well it was always pronounced LER-jurnn...no, no the fuck it wasn't. His name was La-June....

Words have meaning.

quote:

Originally posted by MikeinNC:
No it has not...much like the Camp Lejune bullshit here in NC a year back...som crackhead said "Well it was always pronounced LER-jurnn...no, no the fuck it wasn't. His name was La-June....

Words have meaning.

But...but...This guy says it's Le Jernnnn!

http://spectrumlocalnews.com/n...ejeune-pronunciation

Like pronouncing Qatar (rhymes, appropriately, with catarrh) "cutter," or Braaaaack pronouncing Pakistan "pocky-ston" while corpsman is "corpse-man." Pretentious assholes trying to sound sophisticated.

quote:

Originally posted by egregore:
Pretentious assholes trying to sound sophisticated.

That, and steering as far away from "nig-ger" as anyone could possibly get.

quote:

Originally posted by Gustofer:

quote:

Originally posted by egregore:
Pretentious assholes trying to sound sophisticated.

That, and steering as far away from "nig-ger" as anyone could possibly get.

Thats what it used to be called...unacceptable since bill chiton and the introduction of PC.

Well, I always pronounced it Ny-JUR.

flashguy

What I was taught is:

Nigeria should sound like Ny-jeer-ia.

Niger should sound like Ny-jheer.

And neither sounds like Nigger, nor each other....

I don't think there's anything pretentious about it.

Foreign words often sound... wait for it... foreign.

It's like Iraq and Iran (there is no I sound in either, it's an E sound).

Or like Wang (there is no Long A sound in Chinese, it's an Ah sound).

What seems to happen a lot is that many people have heard it wrong for so long, and others butcher it so badly, that when someone does it right it sounds funny to some. This is compounded by immigrants who either had it butchered so long they gave up or they're so many generations away from their immigrant fore-person that it got mangled in between. All the while those in the News are all over the board, so most everyone is confused.

It's kind of like that scene in Idiocracy where they accuse him of taking like a fag because he's articulate and uses bigger words.

It’s likely both the English and the French pronunciations regarding the same river would sound foreign to the locals. Former French colony, if you go there the locals still speak French and pronounce it Ni-Jheer. In Nigeria the English-speaking locals pronounce it NI-djer.

I thought the French pronunciation was nee-ZHAY.

Only you honkies have to pronounce it "Ni-jheer".

The brothers say it the way it is.

.

Nee-zhair, says my next-door neighbour, who was a missionary there for three years.

tac

Because so many foreign countries struggle to pronounce America with and America sound, right? I'm going with pretentious.

FWIW, I have always pronounced it like "Nigeria" minus the "ia."

As I recall, both countries' names derive from the Latin word for 'black'. I don't know Latin but I would suspect the traditional pronunciation would be derived from that.

My digging suggests that the country is named after the river of the same name and that the river may be named such because of a misunderstanding of the Berber name for the river, "ger-n-ger". Like how our Connecticut is a butchering of an Algonquian word or phrase.

Apparently the river isn't silty, so calling it "black" in Latin (i.e. niger) would be odd.

Perhaps likely is that the Europeans heard something remotely similar to niger, a word they knew, and just rolled with that, rather than it having anything to do with the qualities of the river itself, let alone the the pigmentation of the people.

Related, unfortunately amusing story: last year my class was looking at a map of the Mediterranean, on which Libya and Egypt were the southernmost countries. One particularly ditzy girl asked, "Can you pull the map down further so I can see Niger?" Every other kid in the class looked at her with the most profound look of "WTF?" on their faces.

It was a French colony until around 1960 so it's not surprising it is spelled and has a French pronunciation.
That's the same as it was when I first studied geography back in the dark ages.