Reply #16: What's in a name? :) [View All]

[pinboy3niner]

Matthew Weaver and Paul Owen post at The Guadian's Middle East Live Blog:


Hardly breaking news, but the Foreign Office has defended its slightly eccentric way of spelling Muammar Gaddafi's name.

Jimmy Leach (a former Guardian staff member who used to be my boss and who now has the title "head of digital diplomacy at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office") writes:

So why do we spell Qadhafi like that? Why don't we spell it "Gadaffi" like everyone else and make sure everyone can find our content?

This is certainly a contender for the most inconsequential thought around Libya's momentous time, but I'll make it anyway. Given that we communicate in order to explain, shouldn't we use those same principles of SEO and spell the name like everyone else in the west seems to?

For one thing, the experts here seem to think that we spell it correctly: we spell the name with the Arabic equivalent of a Q. There is, they say, no letter in the Arabic alphabet that corresponds universally to the English hard "g" – in some dialects a hard q (ie k at the back of the throat) softens to something closer to g (as in western Libya, or northern Yemen); in other dialects (eg Egypt, south Yemen, eastern Libya) the Arabic equivalent of the English j hardens to a g . So using "G" can be confusing.

So Qadhafi it is. Because it's right. In cases like this, the alternative would be to say "let's do something wrong, everyone else does". That's a perfectly respectable argument for a digital business reliant on web traffic. The Foreign Office has other considerations …

All we have to do now is persuade Google to add "Did you mean Qadhafi?" at the top of all the rest of the results.

My colleague Esther Addley wrote a piece about this issue after the rebels stormed Tripoli and Mohammed Gaddafi's passport was found, revealing that his name is spelled "Gathafi":

For most of his 42 years in power western nations have wrestled with two pressing issues in relation to Muammar Gaddafi : how to contain his murderous megalomania - and how to spell his name in Roman characters.

More than 100 different transliterations from the Arabic have been recorded for the deposed Libyan dictator's name, with his surname variously rendered Ghaddafy, Kadaffi and al-Qadhdhafi.

Now, thanks to rebel looters, the question of how to spell the name - or at least how the Gaddafi family prefer to render it - may have been settled. Unverified footage posted online on Wednesday by a group called the Libyan Youth Movement appears to show the looted diplomatic passport of the colonel's eldest son, giving his name as "Mohammed Moammar Al Gathafi", and his title "Son of the Leader of the Revolution".

No major news organisation currently uses "Gathafi". The Guardian and most British media use Gaddafi , while the Foreign Office, like the US state department, prefers Qadhafi. The New York Times calls him Qaddafi, Le Monde goes for Khadafi, and Corriere della Sera uses Gheddafi.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/middle-east-live/2011/sep/07/libya-hunt-gaddafi-live-updates#block-13


Personally, I follow the authoritative reference, http://www.spelldictator.com/

:evilgrin: