LONDON: Stretched out as they are from Casablanca to Aden, the world's quarter-billion native speakers of Arabic, like their English- speaking counterparts, have evolved different pronunciations for words which, written down, look the same.

But George Bush's recent pronunciation in a globally televized speech of the name of Baghdad's infamous prison, Abu Ghraib, couldn't be explained away, even under the heading Texas Arabic. First he called it "Abu-ga-rayp". Then "Abu Garon". And finally "Abu Garah".

Few English speakers would be able to get the name absolutely right. In Arabic, the second word is spelled with four letters: ghayn, ra, ya and ba. It's the ghayn that's tricky: no such sound exists in English. It's like the Scots "ch" in "loch", but with the vocal cords working at the same time. An instant of gargling, if you will.

Even Dr Catherine Sangster of the BBC's famed pronunciation research unit says that she doesn't expect BBC presenters to be able to pronounce the real ghayn. "The Anglicized pronunciation that we are recommending to BBC broadcasters is 'abboo grayb'," she says. "If Reuters' report of Bush's version of the prison's name is accurate... we would certainly regard all those as wrong."

Another wobble is over the diphthong represented by the "ai". English speakers could pronounce it like "day" or like "eye" - either would be right, as the actual Arabic pronunciation is about halfway in between.

None of this explains how Abu Ghraib becomes, in the mind of the president of the United States, "Abu Garon". Bush has previously dismissed suggestions that he may suffer, like his brother Neil, from a form of dyslexia.

His father, too, was notorious for his peculiar syntax, but the current president's brain appears to lock and skid at the very thought of an unfamiliar word - hence "resignate" for "resound", "subliminable" for "subliminal", and his repeated references on a past visit to Spain to a gentleman called "Anzar", rather than the actual Spanish prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar.

The awkwardness of this episode was that Mr Bush claims to speak Spanish. Perhaps he should make an effort to learn the language of Iraq. According to the website of London's School of Oriental and African Studies: "There is no language in the world as systematically comprehensible as Arabic." -Dawn/The Guardian News Service.