Day 126: Niger

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ng.html

Discuss.

[Cubby]

A few years ago it had the highest fertility rate in the World. The average woman gave birth to 7 babies in her lifetime. That number has probably dropped to 5 or 6 by now, since there is no population explosion problem anymore, just a birth shortage and rapidly expanding elderly one.

I remember in my Middle School social studies class, a kid saying "Hey Mike, there's a country called N-----!". But its really pronounced with a long "i" syllable. It grated on me when journalists called it "Nee-jer" during the Joe Wilson story, they were wrong. Same with calling Qatar "cutter". I couldn't believe how stupid they were.

[MasterJedi]

Too bad it's so poor. US needs to modernize and then annex it.

[© tweed]

Too bad it's so poor. US needs to modernize and then annex it.

Why would we "need" to do this?

Africa is a disaster.  No American money should be wasted on it, especially through "modernization".  That'd cost billions, easily.  The only was we should spend money on Africa is to maybe airlift condoms to people, but chances are they wouldn't know what to do with them.  So even that'd be a waste of resources.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Too bad it's so poor. US needs to modernize and then annex it.

Why would we "need" to do this?

Africa is a disaster.  No American money should be wasted on it, especially through "modernization".  That'd cost billions, easily.  The only was we should spend money on Africa is to maybe airlift condoms to people, but chances are they wouldn't know what to do with them.  So even that'd be a waste of resources.

For some reason MasterJedi wants to annex pretty much every other single country in the world.

Despite the rather obvious facts that:

1-This would eventually result in the United States being ruled by the rest of the world rather than vice-versa
2-This would result in a world government, exactly the type of thing conservatives tend to be against

This also doesn't even take into account the disastorous effects it'd have th economy, note the economic woes Germany had after reunification, and East Germany was only about a third the size of West Germany and it's per capita income was about 1/4 of West Germany's. Now imagine the US annexing a bunch of third world countries with equal population to the US and a per capita income of less than 1/10 of the US's.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

It grated on me when journalists called it "Nee-jer" during the Joe Wilson story, they were wrong. Same with calling Qatar "cutter". I couldn't believe how stupid they were.

That's because that is the proper pronunciation:  /niːˈʒɛə(ɹ)/, altho /ˈnaɪdʒə(ɹ)/ is also acceptable.  The former is what you get when you apply French phonetics to the spelling, the latter is what you get when you apply English phonetics.  Since French is the offical language there, applying the French pronuciation makes sense. Qatar sufferes from the fact that English and Arabic use different phonemes and of the phonemes in the Arabic pronunciation, /ˈqɑ̱.tˁɑ̱r/, only the r is in use in English.  So depending on which way you shade the phonemes to an English equivalent, you end up with a lot of different pronunciations.

[Undisguised Sockpuppet]

Too bad it's so poor. US needs to modernize and then annex it.

Absolutely not. The US should only modernize and annex culturally similar places.

[Cubby]

It grated on me when journalists called it "Nee-jer" during the Joe Wilson story, they were wrong. Same with calling Qatar "cutter". I couldn't believe how stupid they were.

That's because that is the proper pronunciation:  /niːˈʒɛə(ɹ)/, altho /ˈnaɪdʒə(ɹ)/ is also acceptable.  The former is what you get when you apply French phonetics to the spelling, the latter is what you get when you apply English phonetics.  Since French is the offical language there, applying the French pronuciation makes sense. Qatar sufferes from the fact that English and Arabic use different phonemes and of the phonemes in the Arabic pronunciation, /ˈqɑ̱.tˁɑ̱r/, only the r is in use in English.  So depending on which way you shade the phonemes to an English equivalent, you end up with a lot of different pronunciations.

I guess thats why the city of Benghazi has like 6 different ways of being spelled. Arabic is a tricky language.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

At least the pronounciation helps distinguish it from Nigeria. Residents of it are called Nigeriens as opposed to Nigerians, which helps in text but not spoken. In fact, something that most people don't realize even though they do it every day, is that there really isn't any difference at all in pronounciation of unstressed vowels. All of the following words have the unstressed syllables in them usually pronounced the same way, despite the different letters, and the fact people usually don't realize this: alone, sofa, system, easily, gallop, circus, banana, collect. Even though there is theoretically a "correct" way to pronounce them where they do sound different, this hardly ever happens in casual conversation.

[WMS]

As I stated at some point in the past two years, proof positive that, sometimes, killing the right person can solve a great deal of their problems - referring to the assassination of their last dictator and return to rough democracy.

[minionofmidas]

It grated on me when journalists called it "Nee-jer" during the Joe Wilson story, they were wrong. Same with calling Qatar "cutter". I couldn't believe how stupid they were.

That's because that is the proper pronunciation:  /niːˈʒɛə(ɹ)/, altho /ˈnaɪdʒə(ɹ)/ is also acceptable.  The former is what you get when you apply French phonetics to the spelling, the latter is what you get when you apply English phonetics.  Since French is the offical language there, applying the French pronuciation makes sense. Qatar sufferes from the fact that English and Arabic use different phonemes and of the phonemes in the Arabic pronunciation, /ˈqɑ̱.tˁɑ̱r/, only the r is in use in English.  So depending on which way you shade the phonemes to an English equivalent, you end up with a lot of different pronunciations.

I guess thats why the city of Benghazi has like 6 different ways of being spelled. Arabic is a tricky language.

Actually, the problem lies not with Arabic but with Latin spelling - its' characters are used to represent so many different things in so many different languages by now it's just not funny anymore, and it's number of characters is actually rather limited - which is an advantage in learning to read and write as kids, of course, but for expert phonetics it's useless.