I suspect the Libyan-who-must-not-be-spelled is a little short of support at the moment. He’s probably counting on the UN to argue over the color of the uniforms of anybody that might intervene.
What are your sources? The Venezuelan government does what Chavez tells it to do and I didn’t hear anything to support your claims.
Fidel Castro also supports Gaddafi: “Cuba’s Fidel Castro, busy writing columns and providing running commentary on world affairs as his brother runs the island nation, has condemned the “colossal campaign of lies” about Libya from the mainstream press. He also explained, in one essay, that the violence in Libya had little in common with the unrest in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere in the Middle East.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/06/AR2011030603790.html
I misread the part of the article I cited above. They condemned the violence, more in reference to the rebels, than Gaddafi, I suppose. And the Venezuelan government is not monolithic. Members of the opposition have expressed disagreement with Chavez.
I also get the impression that Maduro, the foreign minister supports Chavez’s efforts, but is lukewarm toward Gaddafi himself. No evidence, just reading between the lines of the statements he has made. And when the rumors where flying that Gaddafi may have fled to Caracas, I read articles that indicated the Chavez would probably be the only one to greet him. I think there would be serious demonstrations in Venezuela if Gaddafi actually tried to flee there.
At this point I don’t think he has any safe havens.
Until we take a stand.
The West it seems.
Russia and China are holding out against a US sponsored no-fly zone in Libya. Those are the friends who count right now. The rest are just hot air.
How do you know how he actually pronounces it? Is there audio of him saying it? How closely does the sound of this pronunciation actually track with the spelling you proposed?
This points up the difference between transcription and transliteration, which are so often confused, but are completely different concepts. Transcription is an encoding of spoken sounds into writing. It tracks with phonetics. Transliteration is a system for converting one writing system into another. The orthography of alphabetically or syllabically written languages is keyed to phonemes. Phonetics has to do with the actual sounds that are heard, and can be very complex with all the variant sounds. Phonemes are a limited set of conceptual sound categories for a given language. The thing is, in everyday speaking nobody hears the phonetics, we only hear the phonemes. That’s why English speakers don’t hear the difference between the t in stop and the t in top. They’re different phonetically, but in English they’re the same phoneme. In Hindi or Thai they’re different phonemes. Alphabetic and syllabic orthographies only encode the phonemes, and they ignore phonetics. It’s only specialists in linguistics who actually pay attention to phonetics. If English were transcribed phonetically, it would look very strange.
The standardized transliteration systems I’m talking about are all encodings of phonemes, because they only deal with the orthography of the original text. A properly set up transliteration system uses a one-to-one correspondence of written glyphs that allows you to reverse transliterate into the original script without any loss of data going back and forth. From LC romanization, you can accurately reconstruct the original Arabic text without ever seeing it. Phonetic transcriptions usually don’t allow that, because the correlation between sounds and glyphs is one to many.
The point is that the original Arabic orthography doesn’t transcribe sounds either. The original Arabic script does not tell you how an individual pronounces it in a given dialect either. The written language is called Modern Standard Arabic, and it’s the same across all countries, allowing easy written communication between Arabic speakers who could not understand one another’s spoken dialects.
When accuracy of the written language is important, e.g. when trying to catch terrorists by matching their written names to a database, and the original data is written in Modern Standard Arabic, the only way to track the data accurately in English is with a standardized transliteration. Why should we attempt to transcribe a name’s pronunciation differently depending on different dialects, when the Arabic script itself doesn’t? The Arabic orthography is the crucial data, and it does not vary across dialects.
By analogy, names from Guangzhou are not pronounced at all the way they’re represented in Pinyin, because Pinyin is standardized transliteration of Mandarin phonemes. Nobody minds that you can’t tell from the Pinyin spelling how to pronounce a Cantonese name. Nobody really needs to think about that at all, unless you actually want to have a spoken conversation in Cantonese. For example, the name of Fujian province is known to us in Pinyin transliteration. Never mind that the people who live in Fujian actually pronounce it variously Hok-kian, Hok-giong, or Fuk-kien (depending on dialect). If you went around writing “Hok-giong,” nobody would be able to understand you except speakers of that particular dialect. If you want to communicate in writing, you have to write Fujian. Nobody objects to standardized transliteration of Chinese names, so why should it be a problem with Arabic names?
Likewise, the pronunciation of a name in Tripolitanian Maghribi dialect, or whatever, is not of concern to us, unless one is on the street in Libya trying to catch a cab or something. For us over here, just trying to get a cognitive grip on who is who and what is what in a complex world, we need transliteration of Modern Standard Arabic.
By definition, the opposition are not members of the government.
This is a really bad analogy. The Cantonese and Fukkien speakers really do care. I am married to a Beijinger, who claims to speak Mandarin, but really speaks a Beijing dialect upon which standard Mandarin is based. She goes on and on about how everyone accepts that Mandarin and the PinYin romanization scheme is accepted by all Chinese. Our Cantonese and Fukkienese friends just roll their eyes. It just happens that the last two governments in China, the Nationalists and the Communists both made the enforcement of Mandarin + BoPoMoFo or Mandarin + PinYi as an instrument of national unity, an extension of the common written Chinese language for thousands of years.
Doesn’t mean it is universally accepted or not problematic. You cannot get from PinYin to the Cantonese pronounciations (no 1-1 correspondence). Two friends who have the same name in Chinese write them as Mei and Mui. Good luck getting the Mui to write her name as Mei, because that is the the the PRC wants her to. She was born in Boston, and of the inalienable rights she thinks she has is to romanize her name the way her Father did, using English letters that represent the way it is actually pronounced in her language, Cantonese.
I’m not playing pedant when a dictator is massacring his own population.
The Libyan regime is no longer a government.
France already recognises the opposition as the legitimate government and we should all follow suit.
We also already allow the defected UN delegation to represent Libya in the UN and as far as I know - all the defected Ambassadors.
Err, whatever. But your rant about terrorists ignores the fact that plenty of Arabs write their own names in Latin characters, according to their own preferences.
I never thought I’d say this to you (or anyone), but take this hijack to GQ. 
I would call the opposition parties in a parliament members of the government. With the exception of coalition governments, they are rarely members of the administration. And one of the classic signs of a weakening administration is when ministers start stating opposing viewpoints.
Don’t look at the judiciaries - that is where things get very messy.
My error was that I thought the parliament as a whole and some ministers of the administration had condemned Gaddafi.
tagos, I don’t think Nava was referring to the opposition in Libya, but my statement on Venezuela.
Do not mess with other posters’ statements within quote boxes.
Beyond that, you seem to be commenting on a different thread, since Johanna has not posted any rants about terrorists.
Back off; cool down.
[ /Moderating ]