US President George W. Bush says "nuke-you-lar" not "nuclear," but on Tuesday visitors to the United Nations Internet site could get a handy, abbreviated presidential pronunciation guide for other challenging words.

A quickly remedied glitch momentarily gave visitors to the UN website a version of Bush's UN General Assembly speech that included phonetic spellings for world leaders, a former Soviet satellite, and at least one capital.



©AFP

French President Nicolas Sarkozy is "sar-KO-zee." Mauritania should be said "moor-EH-tain-ee-a." Kyrgyzstan sounds like "KEYR-geez-stan." And the capital of Zimbabwe President Robert "moo-GAH-bee" Mugabe is Harare "hah-RAR-ray."

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said such phonetic guidance is common but curtly rebuffed a questioner who wanted to know whether Bush has a hard time with certain names: "I think that's a offensive question. I'm going to just decline to comment on it."

"I don't know how the draft of the speech -- it was not final -- was posted, but it was, and it was taken down. There's really nothing more to say about it," she told reporters.

Ironically, one of the hardest names to pronounce, that of Myanmar democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi, was not written out in phonetic form, and Bush only briefly stumbled over it before getting it right.