Subject:
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Re: How do you spell Osama?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Sun, 28 Oct 2001 18:24:12 GMT
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Viewed:
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142 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Larry Pieniazek writes:
> Long time readers may recall my grousing at not knowing how to spell Koran
> the currently correct way... well, it's not my fault. I hope this isn't
> viewed as debate fodder, merely information (I found it while rooting for
> something else that IS going to be d.f.)
>
> http://slate.msn.com/?id=2057710&device=
>
> Does anyone know if the article is correct?
Yes. It is. A fairly good synopsis, too. (In my own
work, I've had to deal with the Egyptian Colonel Arabi,
who is variously "Orabi," "Urabi," "Araby," "`Urabi,"
and so forth.[1] "Hussein" is also "Husain" and "Husayn;"
Nasser is "Nasr" and "Nasir." There's no similar variance
in country names because they were devised in a Western
setting and laid down legally in the West; city names
have common-usage and so stabilized in the late 19th-C.
However, in non-Roman alphabets, there was still some
trouble; "Cawnpore" of British India became the Indian
"Kanpur."
However, an Imperial mentality persists; the former
Indonesian potentate, "Abdurrahman Wahid," is actually
(in Arabic) the same as "Abd al-Rahman Wahid"; the odd
transliteration is a partial slur concerning the ability
of Asiatic peoples to pronounce the "L" sound. A lot of
other transliterations from before the 1960s also show
European mispronunciations and translation of local
dialects; this can be valuable, though, because it shows
us where colonizers might have been getting their local
information. Then again, it *is* our alphabet...;)
So if you have two spellings that are different but the
pronunciation is similar, they may in fact be the same;
sort of like non-Latin names being slaughtered at Ellis
Island in front of non-English-speaking immigrants, it
got garbled in third-person translation. (That actually
speaks well of the forbears of those whose complicated
names, like Pieniazek, avoided such a fate--they were
multilingual, or at least insistent.)
long-windedly,
LFB
[1] that ' represents the 'c^ayn, which is a sound that
non-Semitic languages just don't have--and traditionally
it's been ignored or built into another letter. So if
you see a word with a ' it's usually the most faithful
to the Arabic original, e.g. "Qu'ran".
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | How do you spell Osama?
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| Long time readers may recall my grousing at not knowing how to spell Koran the currently correct way... well, it's not my fault. I hope this isn't viewed as debate fodder, merely information (I found it while rooting for something else that IS going (...) (23 years ago, 28-Oct-01, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
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