It drives me crazy how they pronounce it like "cutter". After looking at the CIA Factbook, it says that is the way to pronounce it but if we were fighting the French they wouldn't say "Pair-ee, Frahn-ce". What gives?
Tom Brokaw had some minister from Qatar on television and asked this question. Tom proceeded to butcher the nation's name in a half dozen ways and each time the guy said, that is correct. I guess it can be said in many different ways. Kinda like dude. Duuuuuuuuuude! Dude?
if you go to merriam-webster online < http://www.m-w.com/home.htm > you can listen to the proper pronunciation to the word, search for the word and then click on the little "sound" icon.
Interesting discussion. The confusion stems from a key difference between Arabic and English: there are no direct equivalents in Arabic for our vowels. Obviously, the spoken language has the sounds, but the alphabet does not contain all the letters. The "aleph" which looks like this, l, is the only one I can think of, and it's a stressed "ah" sound, as in "Allah." Anyway, most words are written as groups of consonants, usually 3, so the word for book is "kiteb," but it's written just as k-t-b. And the word for drink is "shrub," written as "sh-r-b." So I just checked how Qatar is spelled in Arabic, and sure enough, it's Q-t-r. So who's right? Well, it's easier to say what it's not: "ka-TAR." As I said before, that "ah" sound is always represented by an aleph, and there is no aleph in the word, so there is no stressed "ah" sound either in the first or second syllable. So depending how you personally stress the word "cutter," it probably comes close. Of course, that's just the vowels! The real tough part about that name is actually the glottal Q sound at the beginning. It's not a "k" as in "kiteb" above. It's a whole other sound that we don't even have in English, made way back in the back of the throat, and which I've never mastered.