So is it Osama or Usama bin Laden, or does it matter?
I was told recently that the media have beeen using the U spelling in preference to the O spelling more lately because the former looks too much like USA. I was told that Usama is the prefered/correct anglicisation from the arabic.
Am I being duped? Can any of our friends from Arabic background enlighten me.
Web searches, as you can imagine, are not very helpful.
The Arab diacritical marks used to represent the vowel sounds do not have a direct correspondence to the five letters of the Roman alphabet, A, E, I ,O U. One mark may sound similar to either the E or the I, depending on the accent, and another mark may sound more like O or U. Different European langages have developed the tradition of transliterating either to I or E or to O or U depending on how Arabic is perceived to sound to speakers of that language.
(Note that bin Laden’s group (aka ben Laden’s group) is spelled either al Qaida or al Qaeda depending on the source.)
Thanks Tom
So different countries can translate differently depending on their interpretation of vowels as the listener.
However, the questions remain -
Still, there is quite a difference in sound between the long vowel U (as in puss) and the short O (as in toss).
When I hear it said by Arab people, to me, it sounds like “Usama Ben Laden”. I don’t know where we got the bin part.
I’ve also seen it written “Ousama”. Almost all of the older U.S. government sources (including the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted web site) write Usama, but the media has, since at least before the USS Cole, written it Osama. I doubt it was intentional.
Whenever I search for info on a search engine or database I use the Boolean search
(Osama or Usama) AND xxxx
to get the most relevant results.
Yes, the English vowels do sound different, but that’s not the point. The point is that the Arabic phoneme in question (1) is not exactly either of the English vowels and (2) manifests differently in different dialects of Arabic.
This isn’t quite true; in Standard Arabic, there are only 3 vowel phonemes: /a/, /i/, /u/; each of these short vowels has a corresponding long vowel. /e/ and /o/ do not exist. The pronunciation of Standard Arabic /u/ (as in Usâmah) is the same as the English short vowel in push and pull. It does not sound like an o.
In Persian, it would sound more like an o, but we’re not talking about Persian.
To base different transliterations of different words on different Arabic dialects would be a needless obfuscation, since there is such a thing as Standard Arabic, used all over the Arabic-speaking world. Standard Arabic is one of the five official languages of the United Nations.
The transliteration of short /u/ by “o” may be from French influence because in French, u is a different sound, a rounded front vowel [y] like German ü. So the French transliterate Arabic /u/ with the back-vowel o as the next closest approximation to the Arabic back-vowel /u/. Example: The French write “Koweit” instead of Kuwait. Moo.
When Arabs learn English, they have to learn to differentiate between several more vowel phonemes than they’re used to. In a native Arabic-speaking brain, there are three slots for vowel phonemes. As long as they only have those three slots, the extra vowels will have to be placed in one or the other until more slots are opened up. Thus in Arabic there’s no way to phonemically distinguish [e] from [i}, or [o] from [u}. I have heard an Arab say “bitter” when he meant “better,” and my first Arabic teacher pronounced “poem” as “boom”.
When English speakers learn Arabic, we make similar mistakes with the consonants. Arabic has two /t/ phonemes where we have one, two /h/s, two /s/s, two /k/s, two /d/s, etc.
If I may.
Strikes me as highly theoretical. In spoken “Standard Arabic” I have observed, pronunciation of the fatha (a/e)), kasra (i/e) and dumma (o/u) varies according to region, even among well-versed speakers.
North Africa pronunciation of fatha (fat ha) to my subjective hearing tends towards a short “e” sound, while kasra towards the i.
I do agree that actual pronunciation across diallects for the for dumma rarely sounds like the open “o” of anglo-american pronunciation of Usama/Osama, however you should not take very literaly the theoretical phoneme correspondences above as frankly they do not exist in genuine usage. Unless one adopts the idea that one region’s classical pronunciation is “better” than anothers. Of course Arabs do so, but I see it as largely baseless regional prejudices.
Fiction. Standard Arabic in actual practice has clear regional variations, although Arabs will swear up and down otherwise for ideological reasons. Some terms are extent in North Africa that are not found in the Sham, etc. etc. etc. It’s really quite artificial to pretend otherwise.
There is large regional variation here, in reality. For reasons unknown to me, North African dialectal speakers, even those who do not have a command of French, do not seem to have the same problems that eastern dialectal speakers. Perhaps berber influence, I don’t know.
The p - b difference seems to really challenge the Gulf and Egyptians.
Made all the worse for the fact that for each of these there dialectal subvarients.
Collounsbury, your post seems to suggest that you don’t know the meaning of “phoneme.” A phoneme is like a slot covering a certain range of phonetic space, which can accommodate a number of different “phones” (phonetic sounds). You described my analysis as “theoretical” — of course, the whole phenomenon of the phoneme is theoretical, in the sense that native speakers who haven’t studied linguistics are unlikely to be aware of it. Nonetheless, it is real just the same, as much as any scientifically defined phenomenon like the “isobar” on a weather map is real, even if people on the ground don’t “feel” an isobar when they feel the weather.
The wide ranges of variant vowel sounds you described are well known to students of Arabic like me. That was not in question. But I think you missed the point I was making, which is that, no matter how many sounds there are, they are all folded into only three phonemic slots.
Collounsbury, with your extensive experience in the world of social science, you’ve no doubt come across the emic/etic issue. Emic (from “phonemic”) is the way an outside researcher would look at a cultural phenomenon objectively, applying an academic frame of reference. Etic (from “phonetic”) is the way the people in that culture themselves look at the same thing from within their own homegrown frame of reference. There has been a lot of debate over which of these ways of looking should be privileged, or whether either should be privileged. I was going to make this the topic of another thread.
When we transcribe a character between slashes, that means it’s a phoneme. Between square brackets, it’s a phonetic sound.
So the phoneme /u/ could hypothetically take in any number of different phones, including [u}, [u:], [y], [U}, [o], [O], [@], etc. (Apologies for having to substitute ASCII characters for IPA).
Back to the OP, to restate my answer taking into account Collounsbury’s caveats:
The actual phonetic pronunciation of d.ammah, the Arabic /u/ phoneme in the name Usâmah, in the highest-profile dialects of Standard Arabic (Egyptian, Levantine, Iraqi, for example), is closer to the English vowel in push and pull than it is to any other phonetic sound known to English speakers. It’s definitely more [u} than [o]. The Arabs themselves might transcribe it either “o” or “u” indifferently, because they have only one phoneme to cover both sounds. So I wouldn’t advise taking their spelling as a precise guide to the actual sound.
As for the digraph “ou”, that’s a Frenchism, and the long history of Middle Eastern peoples mediating their languages through French when communicating with the West is a whole other topic for another day.
Perhaps I misunderstood, however I read your original as indicating there was in fact a clear MSA pronunciation, versus dialectal variation when in fact even with MSA usage there is variation on how fatha, dumma and kasra are actually said.
Well, again, the manner in which you stated it I believe led to the misaprehension that within Standard Arabic there was in fact a single pronunciation.
The restatement above and below is, I think clearer.
True.
Thanks Jomo Mojo and Collounsbury.
It seems to be agreed that the correct translation, based on a standard Arabic, is correctly written commencing with a U.
I still wonder if the spelling used in the press has moved to use O for Osama rather than U, because of similarity in spelling between Usama(h) and USA.
It seems to me you’re jumping to conclusions here. What is clear that pronunciation, phonemes, phones, and spelling depend a lot on assumption and perception. I would say that the comments here suggest why a linguist might prefer to use “U” rather than “O,” but correct might be too strong a word.