Our difficulty with Arabic

"Just spell my name correctly!"

I have a theory that Americans find it hard to follow events in the Mideast and elsewhere, because we find it hard to follow their language. Just look at a list of terrorists -- can you pronounce their names? I often wonder how the CIA keeps track of them all.

"Johnson," the excellent language blog at The Economist, takes a crack at explaining Arabic names, in particular that of Muammar Qaddafi.

NO ONE knows how much longer we'll have to write about Libya's dictator, so now seems a good time to take a crack at his name. Why is the man The Economist calls Muammar Qaddafi spelled so many different ways? A simple version of this question is sometimes phrased "Why can't we write it how they say it? There's got to be a best way." 

There are a few problems in turning Arabic into Roman letters. 

1) Arabic has sounds that aren't easily renderable in Roman letters without diacritics. The h-sound in "Tahrir" I mentioned the other day requires the International Phonetic Alphabet's ħ to distinguish it from English's h-sound, which Arabic also has. But of course most people aren't going to go to the length of finding and using special characters.

2) Arabic has moved a long way in the 14 centuries since the advent of Islam, but the writing system hasn't. Arabs still write with an alphabet suited to the sounds of classical Arabic, but which lacks many of the sounds used in modern dialects (and names).

3) When transliterating, experts like to try to match one Roman letter to each Arabic letter, so we don't have the Qaddafi problem, and so try to agree that q, for example, will always represent the Arabic letter called qaf, even though it sounds nothing like the English q. But, following on from 2 above, this usually means relying on the written form (which doesn't change) rather than the spoken (which can, from region to region or person to person).

If you were a linguist or other expert, with all of the tools of the trade to hand, you'd day something like "The name
القذافي
can carefully transliterated as al-Qaḏḏāfī, according to its Arabic spelling, but is pronounced by Libyans as al-Gaddāfī." 

This is because 

- In classical Arabic, the q beginning his name is pronounced like a k-sound made as far back in the throat as possible. But in many dialects including the main Libyan ones, it's pronounced like a g. So the q/g tradeoff is the one between how it's written and how it's said. K, meanwhile, isn't a great option here. It gets neither the Arabic spelling nor the pronunciation quite right. Kh is worse still. It is used to represent an Arabic sound—just not the one in Qaddafi's name. 

- the middle consonant isn't hard to say: in Classical Arabic it's just like the th sound in the English there. (Not like the one in third). But in modern Libyan Arabic, that sound has become a d-sound. So dh represents the spelling, d the pronunciation. Those who want to show that it's doubled in Arabic can opt for dd, as we do. 

If forced to pick, I'd say Qaddhafi represents the Arabic spelling pretty well, and Gaddafi represents the Libyan pronunciation pretty well. (The "al-" is optional. It's always used in Arabic but frequently left out in English. The Economist's style book recommends leaving it out in most names.) Our "Qaddafi" is a bit of a hybrid, but it's not the worst. Stay away from the k's and kh's, though, in any case. Those sounds do exist in Arabic, but not in the name Qaddafi.

You might want to share this with a spook you know.