Imagine it’s Jeopardy!, and you have to write down the answers. Which spelling do you use?
I’d put “Quran” as it sounds to my ear marginally closer to how I’ve heard it pronounced in Arabic and Czar because it’s closer to “Caesar”, from where the title originates.
ETA; last one should read “Tsar” not “Tzar” :smack:, “Tzar” would be in “other”.
Koran & Czar.
Actually, I’d like to be more “proper” on Koran except I’d probably wind up shooting myself in the foot by writing Q’ur’an or something and being disqualified. I’m better off playing it safe.
Other spelling option combination you left out:
Koran, Tsar
(I’m not as old as Tchaikovski or Tschebyscheff…but some of my books are.)
Are there actually correct spellings of worlds from languages that use different alphabets? From what authority?
The ruler of Libya presented a dilemma for news media, and no clear answer – or actually, 112 clear answers.
Cecil weighed in onthe difficulties involved.
The best authority would be the person possessing the name, or the government of the nation that includes the city, province, or natural feature in question.
If China says it’s Beijing, and India says its Kolkata, they’re the relevant authorities.
I wonder if there are standardized spellings in Arabic and Russian (and how Alex and the judges would deal with the smartass who wrote them that way).
Also, in Final Jeopardy, why would anyone bet $200?
Im not so sure. Should St Petersburg have been called Leningrad? Chemnitz Karl Marxstadt? Saigon Ho Chi Minh city? Especially if someone was a political prisoner from that country?
I’d be inclined to make a distinction between a spelling convention and an outright name change.
madsircool: That’s a whole different kettle of snails: you’re asking, in essence, how do large numbers of people make decisions which shall affect them all.
Communist Party Central Committee? Parliament? Congress? The King? Popular Vote?
In general, in any given sphere, there will be some more-or-less legitimate decision-making body, and they are the “proper authority.” Otherwise, what else do we have? God? The Creator left it up to Adam to make up names for the animals he saw, and we, today, have the same license when it comes to our cities (etc.)
If you can propose a universal system for the right to name names, which will cover all possible events and situations, and will be acceptable to all… I’ll buy ya a drink!
Good call. 
Even native English names have lots of spellings in English when spelling isn’t standardized.
How many ways was Shakespeare spelled?
Wiki article also lists multiple variant spellings for Sir Walter Raleigh and Thomas Dekker.
Quran because it’s truer* to the Arabic and tsar because it’s true to the Russian. The spelling “czar” never made a damn bit of sense to me. The only language that uses the “cz” digraph is Polish, but there it represents a different sound. The Russian letter Ц is plainly /ts/; why muck it up for no reason? Because we’re used to the senselessly mucked-up version. That doesn’t work for me. Get it right already.
*True to Arabic would have to include the apostrophe, because that represents the glottal stop, a full consonant phoneme in Arabic. To ignore it would be like translating English but not bothering to represent the sound of /p/ at all. Imagine “Eter Ier icked a eck of ickled eppers” and that’s how weird it seems to native Arabic speakers to treat the glottal stop like it doesn’t exist. Arabic doesn’t have /p/, but they can still approximate it.
“Czar” better preserves the linguistic connection to “Caesar”, the word it derives from.
Well, there is Standard Arabic Technical Transliteration System. Makes the Muslim holy book = QRAN
At least with Arabic, some of the confusion comes from regional pronunciations despite standardized spelling within the language. The character vocalized as “Q” in some regions is pronounced as “G” (like Golf) in North Africa. I seem to recall the Egyptians also pronounce their “J” as “G” (like Golf). It’s not so different from English. There are accents you can barely understand that disappear completely in writing.
Where you been? SATTS has been deprecated for years.
This discussion does not involve the colloquial varieties of Arabic, which in comparison to literary Arabic are like the various Romance languages in comparison to Latin; we’re not talking about how to transcribe the sounds of spoken varieties. We’re talking about transliteration, going off of written text, which is invariably in literary Arabic.
It doesn’t even matter in this case, because all of the standardized romanizationsuse q for ق and an apostrophe or other similar mark for hamzah. So the word in question would turn out Qur’an no matter which standard you follow. The important thing is to pick one standard and stick with it. The United States has settled on one standard romanization of Arabic in the Intelligence Authorization Act passed by Congress in November 2002, and it is a simplified adaptation of the Library of Congress system.
‘China’ and ‘India’ (and for that matter any country, ethnic group, community, etc.) aren’t persons, they are collectives made up of many people who might disagree with each other about what they want a city to be called.
I use the name ‘Bombay’, not ‘Mumbai’, because I don’t care for the government that renamed the city, or for the ideological grounds upon which it was renamed. Likewise, I think a lot of former South Vietnamese refugees refer to the city as ‘Saigon’, not ‘HCM City’, and while I don’t much care for the former Republic of South Vietnam, I don’t especially care to argue with them about it.
I don’t know whether Koran or Quran is a better transliteration, but ‘czar’ plainly makes no sense. It’s spelled with the equivalent of ‘ts’ in Russian.