Bush’s Yew Inn speech in phonetics

Published 11:10 pm Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Bit of a slip-up at the United Nations this week. Someone posted a copy of President Bush’s address on the U.N. Web site, but turns out it was a draft, complete with helpful phonetic pronunciations for various countries and people.

“The United States, salutes the nations that have recently taken strides toward liberty,” the draft said, “including Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan (KEYR-geez-stan), Mauritania (moor-EH-tain-ee-a), Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Morocco.”

“In Zimbabwe,” the draft said, “the behavior of the Mugabe (moo-GAH-bee) regime is an assault on its people,” and the U.N. “must insist on change in Harare (hah-RAR-ray).”

There was a tip of the hat to “French President Sarkozy (sar-KO-see).”

The mix-up seemed to unsettle even the usually mild-mannered White House press secretary, Dana Perino.

“On the speech — your question about the speech,” she told reporters, “the drafts are circulated, and there was an error made in trying to make sure that interpreters had what they needed. I don’t know how the draft of the speech — it was not final — was posted, but it was, and it was taken down. There’s really nothing more to say about it.”

What about the phonetic spellings? “That’s not unusual,” she said. “We do that for many speeches.”

“Does the president have a hard time pronouncing some of these countries’ names?” a reporter asked.

“I think that’s an offensive question. I’m going to just decline to comment on it.”