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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 pronunciati
by 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 agoArabic 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 agoIn 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 agoThanks 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)