Having improbably broken out of their
northwest-Yemen fastnesses, first to overrun Yemen itself, a previously obscure
Zaydi tribal formation has now
captured world headlines and are all over the airwaves. It’s still early days, and two
pronunciations are vying for mastery, one correct and one a
mispronunciation. The correct
pronunciation is:
HOO-thee,
with the voiceless version of the interdental
fricative th, thus rhyming with toothy. (Were it the
voiced version of our ambiguous digraph th,
it would rhyme with smoothie.) Some broadcasters are mispronouncing it
HOO-tee; this post is an effort to
strangle that in the cradle.
(We earlier offered the same service w.r.t. ISIS vs ISIL;
in that case, the changeling won out.)
This interdental fricative phoneme is not
especially common among the better-known world languages, but Arabic in fact
has it in both voiced and voiceless versions, respectively spelled ذ and
ث .
The latter appears in the Yemeni name حوثي.
The French language lacks both of these, and the h sound as well (of which last Arabic is
richly supplied with two phonemically distinct versions, a breathy and a ‘strong’
or pharyngealized); hence they
are reduced to bleating “oo-tee”. But you wouldn’t want to sound like that, now would you.
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