Re: Osama or Usama?

[TC Cheever <tc@chaostheory.com>]

Jeremy Mixer wrote:

 > Something that caught my interest, I am at work, my shift is winding 
down,
 > and I am checking out some of the various news web sites to see if there
 > are any news updates. Every news agency from the best of my knowledge
 > spells Osama bin Laden just as I typed it. However, foxnews.com seems to
 > insist on spelling it Usama bin Laden. Are both correct, or is foxnews on
 > crack?



I believe-- the possibility of Fox News being on crack not
withstanding-- that both are acceptable spellings. Like most non-Romance
languages with non-Roman character sets, Arabic names are phonetically
translated to English, and often the sounds don't directly match English
speech.

I have seen the holy book of Islam spelled as Koran and Qu'ran; you
often see wildly different spellings of the last name of the leader of
Libya-- Time uses Gaddafi, the CIA Fact Book uses Qadhafi, BBC uses
Gadaffi, CNN uses Gadhafi, etc. Local TV usually follows whatever the
network has settled on for usage.

This is also evident in a lot of Asian names-- Mao Zedong & Mao
Tse-Tung, Peking/Beijing, etc.


-TC