A family name is a name passed on from parent to child unchanged from generation to generation and is shared by your closest blood relatives. If your second name is derived from your father’s given name, then it is known as a “patronymic” rather than a family name. If your parents, children, and siblings don’t use this name the same way you do, then it’s not your family name.
Jomo Mojo, I speak Russian and therefore am quite familiar with patronymics. However, this business of using his first name only seems to be unique to the U.S.; when I was in England this spring, they used both. (Maybe other non-U.S. Dopers can comment?)
I still think there’s a deeper psycholinguistic significance to the American public usage of his name, especially when it was coming from the mouth of George Sr.
Wonderful. After sharing utter disinformation previously, you pontlessly natter on.
To the point:
(a) Family name in the proper sense is now established in most of the Arab world, for bureaucratic reasons. Not everyone uses it consistently but it is established.
(b) Usage seems to me to have gained greater currency in the past 50 years, based in part on my casual observation in re how age groups use names and in part on the history of governmental developments in the past 100 yrs.
© Sadaam was born in '37 if memory serves, before bureaucratic req. had an impact on rural society, he likely received his name in the traditional manner. Mere trivia really as you will note that Hussien (nota bene, actual pronunciation is something along the lines of hoo sane, I might prefer righting Hussain actually) is used as his sons family name. Not Sadaam. It is, then, a family name now.
(d) American usage, and media in particular, seems as much driven by a cheap (and ultimately misplaced) desire to demean Sadaam.
This should close the question out. Now I have to resist replying to all the simple minded misunderstanding and idiocy about Iranians wanting to “Westernize”
Thank you, Collounsbury, for the detail, but I’m a little mystified at your hostility. I was merely responding to Sailor’s comment about the definition of “family name.”
As for the the two points which you say I have gotten wrong, I’ll thank you for correcting me. I’ll add only that the story about “Saddam” being a self-chosen name is one that has been reported in the news media in the past. I’m not surprised they got something like that wrong. They’re always getting facts about Indian names wrong as well.
I believe my previous comment jives with your point (d).
With respect to the transliteration of the name as “Hussein” rather than “Hussain,” it depends on what system you’re basing the transliteration on. If your touchstone is English orthography, then it is true that “ai” is a more common spelling for the [eI] diphthong than “ei” is. However, if you are used to more formal transliterations, such as the International Phonetic Alphabet, then “ei” seems more appropriate.
Enough of this. I’m going to see what the sorority girls are getting up to. 
acsenray, the two formal transliterations officially used in the United States, the Library of Congress system and the Board of Geographic Names system, both transliterate that diphthong as ay. There’s a good reason for this, being that the second part of the diphthong is the Arabic consonantal letter y. So in both these systems, Hussein is spelled Husayn. (The s in this name is actually single, not double; the erroneous doubling in “Hussein” is due to interference from conventional French spelling.)
Those are transliterations because they transfer a written letter (litera = Latin for letter) from one orthography into another.
IPA transcribes phonetic sounds, not orthography, so you couldn’t really call it a transliteration. An alphabet captures phonemes rather than phonetics. In Arabic, the phonemes written “ay” (fat.hah yâ’) can have two different phonetic realizations, either /aj/ or /ej/ in IPA. There’s the emic-etic issue, which I was planning to make the subject of another thread.
I am in the “Saddam-is-first-name-field”.
“Saddam” is his first name and “Hussein” his last name (ie his father’s or ancestors’). I guess when you call him Hussein it appears that you may be talking about his father or someone else with the same name. Using the first name makes it so much clearer about who exactly is being referred to, especially when the name is unique like Saddam and Osama.
However, when you come to think of it, calling him Saddam is quite demeaning. It’s like calling the US president “George”.
Well, English orthography manages neither to capture phonemes nor morphemes nor phonetics in a consistent one-to-one correspondence, so, while the transliteration schemes you describe may be perfectly legitimate, there are equally legitimate reasons to prefer “ei” over “ai.” All I’m saying is that there’s no obvious reason to believe that one is better than the other. Myself, I prefer transliteration schemes that stick as close to I.P.A. as possible. Now, when you have a case in which a given phoneme is realised with different phones in different dialects, then you have a choice, don’t you? Do I transliterate according to phoneme? Do I trasliterate phonetically? Do I use a “spelling” transliteration (e.g., is it al-Suriya or as-Suriya)? Does my scheme follow a system keyed to English orthography? to American English orthography? Given so many ambiguities, I think it’s hard to flat out say that “Hussain” or “Husayn” is intrinsically preferable to “Hussein.”
What’s the point of experts in the field posting if you’re not going to read what they have to say? :rolleyes:
I thought it was clear that people such as Bush pronounce his (Saddam’s) name “Sodom” to conjure up images of Sodom of “and Gomorrah” fame, indicating that he is a degenerate who probably performs unnatural acts with animals and small children.
Collounsbury, you are going to seriously upgrade your attitude if you want to continue posting here. I’m tired of getting moderator email every third time you post.
The New York Times calls the president of Iraq Saddam Hussein on first reference, and Mr. Hussein on subsequent references.
Well, I agree with the NY Times. Why should we treat him differently than any other Middle Eastern leader, at least linguistically?
Absolutely no reason, other than common courtesy. Regarding english language newspapers, there’s no problem. Also, in this case, I’ll grant that courtesy might not be preferred 
.
But I bet that if you knew an older arab personally (or a traditional arab of any age), you’d call him what he liked to be called (i.e. his real name and not a westernised version).
Out of interest, how are chinese leader’s names presented in the NYT?
Ho Chi Minh (not his “real” name either) was almost always refered to by his full name. Not that anyone would compare him to the subject of this thread.
Peace,
mangeorge
Well, my publication (not quite the New York Times, but very well respected in its niche) has decided to go with Hussein on 2nd reference. The replies on this thread played a role in that decision.
Maybe the Saddam thing is sort of like calling the late Haitian dicator “Papa Doc”? Sounds like it all might be part of some cult of personality that Hussein has created for himself.
Sorry, I meant were/are they anglicised. I have to admit that I don’t know (I suspect not - last name first and all that). So Ho Chi Mihn would be called Nguyen Tac Thanh (Last, Middle, First), not Thanh Tac Nguyen if they used his real name.
Having said all that, I’m sure that Saddam Hussein has released his name to the press in that form so, as I said, no harm done. Same with Egyptians, Syrians etc., although I’d guess that Bahrain’s Amir would not be refered to as Hamad Al-Khalifa by the NYT.
In the course of my searching for Ho Chi Min, look what I turned up in a usenet post dated 10/08/90:
It should be noted that in many other cultures it’s not unusual for a person to take another name.It’s done in the U. S. too, but mostly by celebrities.
You can, of course, change your name to pretty much anything you like. Once you do officialdom (the courts, etc) is required to refer to you by that name.
Peace,
mangeorge
Getting back to the OP, speaking with some authority as a newspaper copy editor, the Associated Press decided on Saddam during Gulf War I to avoid confusion with the King of Jordan, and this usage has stuck since. This becomes especially important with respect to headlines.
Excellent, an expert newspaper guy. Nice to have the Jordan/Iraq reason confirmed. Can you remember what he was called during the Iran-Iraq war? I suspect that he was President Hussein of Iraq then (when we liked him ), probably also because Jordan was not mentioned in the same article as often.