I present to you
De Qataris Pronuntiatio, or, On The Questionable Realizations Of A Toponymic Tetragraph And Its Many Compositions, Lesser Known Among Imageboarders.
Since time immemorial, two questions have remained present in the minds of all those dwelling /qa/: what do we call ourselves, and how do you pronounce the board's name? It has long been a matter of ⟨/qa/⟩'s phonemic composition, whose myriad expressions appear to contradict each other at every turn. Herein you shall find an authoritative examination of its manifestations and the underlying logic, motivated by the recent anniversary, and based on General American English and General British. (I am sadly forced to neglect Australian pronunciation for the sake of my sanity and time, nothing personal mate.) It's very long, but its length is necessitated by these phenomena's complexity.
The two books I've consulted the most are
Gimson's Pronunciation of English (actually by Cruttenden), and Kreidler's
The Pronunciation of English, while getting transcriptions from
The Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English with some usage of Cambridge here and there.
I'll first go over general English grammar and fundamentals, then compounds, and then free-standing ⟨/qa/⟩. Some of these are heavily subject to board changes, take ⟨/qa/bal⟩: of its 39 total hits, 35 are from 2017-2018. Likewise, 65% of ⟨/qa/non⟩'s 449 instances come from 2020-2021. Patently tied to historical contingency. Also, some words included are less than nice, but they're important to the overall analysis.
Mini-glossary
No.XXXXX = a 4/qa/ post and its number.
⟨xxx⟩ = a word as it is written, not pronounced. After words with ⟨/qa/⟩, the added parenthesis (XX) represents how many times it appears on desuarchive, totalling the root alongside plurals and such.*
/xxx/ = broad transcription, the word as made up of logical units, phonemes.
[xxx] = narrow transcription, specific sounds independent of the logic behind them.
E.g., English ⟨cat⟩ is broad /kæt/, but narrow [kʰæt], with the extra puff of air that English speakers add at the start, but which is generally not treated as relevant.