IN THE past (on DiA, before this blog existed) we looked at Barack Obama's pronunciation of foreign place-names. When he says "Pakistan" like "Pah-kistan", Pakistanis hear someone who says their country's name like they do. Many American conservatives find it preening or annoying. Mr Obama also has a slightly odd pronunciation of Taliban, where instead of making that second vowel a schwa, like most Americans, he makes it an unusually distinct "ee". I don't know enough about Pushtu to say whether his pronunciation is authentic.

At today's speech to the UN's General Assembly, I noticed a few new ones. He spoke of the climate conference in "Copen-hah-gen". This pronunciation is basically over-educated faux-authenticity; Danes overwhelmingly say "Copen-hay-gen" in English. (They say something very different in Danish. "København" is pronounced roughly like "kerp-in-hown".) Mr Obama's slip may result from overgeneralising of the rule that "ah is the best way to pronounce a's in foreign names." Pahkistan is better than Packistan, I-rahq is tonier than I-rack (and much more so than Eye-rack), and the same goes for I-rahn, I-ran, and Eye-ran. But the rule doesn't work for Copen-hah-gen.

Another little slip was perhaps more forgivable; he pronounced "Congo-Kinshasa" as "Congo-Kinsasha". Maybe his mind was elsewhere.

Most interesting was how he said "Jakarta" (about 2:20 in the video), which was certainly not how a typical American would. I imagine his is closer to the native pronunciation. As Ben Zimmer and John McWhorter discussed for some time last week, Mr Obama spent a good bit of time in Jakarta as a child, and may still speak decent Bahasa Indonesia. According the Indonesian president, Mr Obama greeted him in Indonesian and spoke a few pleasantries pretty skillfully before switching to English. But it's not really known how much he knows. Whatever he knows, it's likely the White House's political people tell him to keep it to himself. The official language of the world's biggest Muslim country is not something he can afford to flaunt in the face of superstitions like this. And perhaps more generally, I'm not sure Americans like their leaders speaking foreign languages. When I saw the tin-eared Teresa Heinz Kerry greet 2004's Democratic convention in five languages, I myself suppressed a groan. It's just not going to win you lots of votes on these shores.

(Ben Zimmer, who has studied Indonesian languages closely, e-mails of Mr Obama's "Jakarta", "Yeah, close enough. Sounds like he was going for [dʒakarta] (trilled r, dental t, non-centralized vowels, even syllable stress) rather than the Americanized [dʒəˈkɑɹɾə] (approximant r, flapped t, unstressed first and third syllables with schwas)."