4 ms·

Using Google Ngrams to figure out Gaddafi's correct spelling.

19 points by alphakappa 16y ago

dandelany 16y ago
Clever, but the real correct spelling of his name is: معمر القذافي‎ "Qaddafi" is only "correct" in the sense that it is the most common Latin alphabet spelling...
- derefr 16y ago
  A "correct" use of language, after you get past all the prescriptivists, basically means whatever is most effective and efficient at triggering the right neuronal firings in the most people's minds. For instance, more people will understand "their dogs" than "there dogs" (people who speak English as a non-native tongue are unlikely to understand the latter at all)—and the ones who understand both will understand the former more quickly.
rflrob 16y ago
Part of the problem is that his last name contains a couple problematic letters for transliteration. ق (Qof) is often transliterated as Q, but it's pronunciation varies widely in the Arabic speaking world. In Egypt, depending on the context, it's either a K sound or a glottal stop, and in Gulf Arabic, it's similar to the English hard J sound. In Libyan it's often closer to a G (thus the G in Gaddafi). ذ (Dhal) is the voiced dental fricative: like the TH sound in 'the', 'weather', or 'loathe' (but not thin, with, or within). Arabic also has an unvoiced version of the same consonant (ث), so ذ is sometimes transliterated as dh (d is the voiced version of t).
- zalew 16y ago
  Arabic in general is hard to transliterate properly, especially vowels, f.ex. I noticed 3 versions of Muscat used interchangely - Moscat, Muscat, Masqat and while travelling around Oman often cities who had an A on our maps were spelled with O or U on road signs.
- gst 16y ago
  In addition, the transliteration also depends on the target language. E.g., in English Qaddafi seems to be the more common form, while in German almost always Gaddafi ist used: 866,000 Google hits for: '"gaddafi" site:de' 9,090 Google hits for: '"qaddafi" site:de' (and nearly all of them are English articles)
- alphakappa 16y ago
  Thanks for clarifying it from the script POV. I guess there can never be one true english spelling for some of these words because the sounds don't transliterate perfectly. One the reasons books may be a better way to verify the consensus on spelling (instead of say, checking how many results you get for a certain spelling on the entire web) is because books are more likely to be well-researched. (In my second example, the misspelling 'Ghandi' returns millions of results on Google, while it's almost non-existent in books)
joshes 16y ago
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2011/0223/1224290629972.html http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2011/0223/12242906... According to the Irish times, there are a total of 112 different English spellings of the name. Transliteration from Arabic to English is always tricky, it seems.
swombat 16y ago
I posted this a little while ago... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2253472 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2253472 :-)
kahirsch 16y ago
How to recognized the leader of Libya: $name =~ m/M[ou]'?amm?ar ([aAEe]l[- ])?(Q|[GK]h?)a(d|dd|dh|dhdh|th|zz)afi/

19 points by alphakappa 16y ago

Clever, but the real correct spelling of his name is: معمر القذافي‎ "Qaddafi" is only "correct" in the sense that it is the most common Latin alphabet spelling...

derefr 16y ago
A "correct" use of language, after you get past all the prescriptivists, basically means whatever is most effective and efficient at triggering the right neuronal firings in the most people's minds. For instance, more people will understand "their dogs" than "there dogs" (people who speak English as a non-native tongue are unlikely to understand the latter at all)—and the ones who understand both will understand the former more quickly.

rflrob 16y ago

Part of the problem is that his last name contains a couple problematic letters for transliteration. ق (Qof) is often transliterated as Q, but it's pronunciation varies widely in the Arabic speaking world. In Egypt, depending on the context, it's either a K sound or a glottal stop, and in Gulf Arabic, it's similar to the English hard J sound. In Libyan it's often closer to a G (thus the G in Gaddafi). ذ (Dhal) is the voiced dental fricative: like the TH sound in 'the', 'weather', or 'loathe' (but not thin, with, or within). Arabic also has an unvoiced version of the same consonant (ث), so ذ is sometimes transliterated as dh (d is the voiced version of t).

zalew 16y ago
Arabic in general is hard to transliterate properly, especially vowels, f.ex. I noticed 3 versions of Muscat used interchangely - Moscat, Muscat, Masqat and while travelling around Oman often cities who had an A on our maps were spelled with O or U on road signs.
gst 16y ago
In addition, the transliteration also depends on the target language. E.g., in English Qaddafi seems to be the more common form, while in German almost always Gaddafi ist used: 866,000 Google hits for: '"gaddafi" site:de' 9,090 Google hits for: '"qaddafi" site:de' (and nearly all of them are English articles)
alphakappa 16y ago
Thanks for clarifying it from the script POV. I guess there can never be one true english spelling for some of these words because the sounds don't transliterate perfectly. One the reasons books may be a better way to verify the consensus on spelling (instead of say, checking how many results you get for a certain spelling on the entire web) is because books are more likely to be well-researched. (In my second example, the misspelling 'Ghandi' returns millions of results on Google, while it's almost non-existent in books)

joshes 16y ago

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2011/0223/1224290629972.html http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2011/0223/12242906... According to the Irish times, there are a total of 112 different English spellings of the name. Transliteration from Arabic to English is always tricky, it seems.

swombat 16y ago

I posted this a little while ago... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2253472 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2253472 :-)

kahirsch 16y ago

How to recognized the leader of Libya: $name =~ m/M[ou]'?amm?ar ([aAEe]l[- ])?(Q|[GK]h?)a(d|dd|dh|dhdh|th|zz)afi/