I would naturally read ⟨aw⟩ as /oː/ (as in e.g. ⟨hawk⟩), rather than /ɑː/. The weird part is the [e] — the only thing I can suggest is that they’re one of those people who raise /æ/ to [e] in some positions.
This whole thread is a comedy of errors stemming from different English pronunciation variants. The author of the original article evidently has the full Mary/marry/merry merger but maintains the cot/caught distinction, so "keh·ruh·kaw·ruhm" seems like a natural way of spelling the pronunciation. GP has the cot/caught merger but does not merge Mary/marry, so they read "keh·ruh·kaw·ruhm" as [kerəkɑːrəm] and understood this as distinct from Wikipedia's kær- pronunciation. And you don't have the cot/caught merger or the Mary/marry merger.
They never bother to make an effort. All these decades and they still say "Gey-ndi" and "Jeena" and as if they will get constipated if they learn to pronouce country names correctly. It's not "Pack-istan. They just don't care. I am from India and whenever I hear any of them say that country name, or say Aef-gan-istan, or Eye-ran (that gan, ran are as in "run ran run"), I feel like reaching into the screen or the earpiece and deliver a hard one across one of the speaker's cheeks and hopefully being isnpired by Gey-ndi they'd offer the other one.
Everyone says Germany except for the Germans! And those I know couldn’t care less.
It’s easy to insinuate that people aren’t making an effort. But maybe it’s says more about the person on the receiving end than the person "who is not making the effort".
Germany due to its history of being a conglomeration of smaller states has one of the widest variety of names in foreign languages, depending on the historical focus of those tongues on one or the other of the tribes/peoples: Deutschland (Germany), Germany (English), Allemagne (French, and similarly in Spanish), Tedesco (Italian for a German), Tyksland (Danish), with other variants in Polish and other languages.
The English name of the country of ایران is Iran, pronounced "eye-ran", there's nothing wrong about that. Just like the English name of the country which calls itself Deutchsland is Germany. And the French name of the country that calls itself England is Angleterre, and the Japanese name for China is 中国 (chuugoku).
There is nothing wrong or weird about exonyms. Sometimes they happen to be relatively close to the endonym, sometimes they are not.
There was a discussion about this on NPR recently. According to the guest, the underlying phenomenon (which goes back a long way) is avoiding long-As, an aversion to sounding like snooty Boston Brahmans. It strongly correlates with political and socio-cultural affiliation, and with words that people are self-conscious about or otherwise are deemed to be more likely to signal affiliation. Iran is specifically discussed.
Yup. Because it had been pronounced that way from the get go. It wasn't a town that the British renamed - they literally built the town. There was no "local" name prior to the British.
That doesn't matter, plenty of places like that have been renamed. You either rename it after what the area was called previously or come up with a completely new name.
There's a documentary, "The Last Mountain", about the sister and father of Tom Ballard, who died on Nanga Parbat, going out there to see where he did his final climb. It gives an idea of what it is like to visit.
Incidentally, Tom Ballard was the son of Alison Hargreaves, who died on K2.
In principle, this in not surprising. Throw 100 normal-distributed values at the number line with mean 1 and std deviation 2 and some will end up below 0. The higher you make the mean, the fewer will end up negative and eventually it's unlikely (though still possible) one does.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 5.7 ms ] threadnone of which is [kerəkɑːrəm] as the author suggests
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karakoram
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Karakoram
It’s easy to insinuate that people aren’t making an effort. But maybe it’s says more about the person on the receiving end than the person "who is not making the effort".
There is nothing wrong or weird about exonyms. Sometimes they happen to be relatively close to the endonym, sometimes they are not.
This is an American thing. The British have been pronouncing it E-ran since forever.
Interestingly, Merriam Webster's pronunciation for all these words (including Iran), have it without the "I" sound.
What on earth are they?
None of them knew that it's actually named after a British person (Abbott), and the first part is pronounced that way (as in Abbott and Costello).
Do the locals pronounce it like Abbott and Costello?
Incidentally, Tom Ballard was the son of Alison Hargreaves, who died on K2.