It seems to me that in the arabic language, the o and the u are interchangeable. How come?
arabic uses different symbols. the symbol used for Osama, the one that does the “O”, must sound sort of in between an “O” and a “U” in arabic, so either is sort of half right.
it’s the same in Chinese. Kung Fu for example can also be written Gung Fu because the actual way the Chinese say it is not a full “K” at the start.
I don’t know if there’s an equivalent for Arabic-Roman transliteration, but there’s an internationally agreed system for converting Chinese sounds into Roman characters, so that all the Western media can use the same spellings without getting mixed up by different pronunciations in different Western languages (e.g. the way English, French and Italian pronunciations of “ch” vary).
BTW, as a quick test, I entered “Arabic Roman transliteration” into Google and it threw up plenty of references including ISO documentation, so if you’re interested enough, that might help.
Arabic has only three short vowels,
a i u
and three corresponding long vowels,
a: i: u:
The short e and o do not exist in Arabic. Linguists, scholars of the Arabic language, do not use them in transliteration. Yet the lumpen transliteration almost always converts short /i/ and /u/ into [e] and [o]. Why?
Could it be interference from Persian? This is one theory I’ve heard. In modern Iranian Persian, the short /i/ and /u/ really have become /e/ and /o/. But they are not pronounced that way in Arabic.
This is where the concept of “phoneme” comes in. English recognizes five (actually more than five) phoneme slots to distinguish vowels. So for us /e/ and /i/ are different phonemes. In Arabic both these sounds are collapsed into one phoneme slot, so they can’t be distinguished.
Once I was drinking tea with some Arabs, and someone offered sugar. One of the Arabs said in English, “I’ll use honey instead, that will be bitter.”
Obviously he meant “better,” as honey can’t be bitter!
A linguist doing dialectal research in Carolina asked an old lady, “What do you call the metal that cans are made of?” She said “tin.” Then he asked, “What’s the number after nine?” She said “tin.” Making a note in his notebook, he mumbled, “She pronounces them the same.” She said, “Ah do not!”
Q. What time is it in Ireland when one car follows another?
A. Tin after tin.
That’s why in Ebonics you can’t ask someone to hand you a pen, you have to say “ink pen” – so they won’t think you said “pin.” Something about these Irish and Southern US dialects raises the /e/ to /i/ when it precedes n. In Arabic there is no distinction between the two sounds in any position.
OK, how about the consonants?
I have seen the Libyan leader’s name rendered as:
Kaddafi
Khaddafi
Gaddafi
Ghaddafi
Qaddafi
Sometimes with one “d”, sometimes with two.
Sometimes with one “f”, sometimes with two.
Sometimes ending in “i”, somtimes in “y”.
What’s the current preference?
I think that a search of the GQ threads from the last few days will give you a fairly comprehensive answer to this question.