If you’ve been reading about Osama bin Laden and Usama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and Al Quaida, you may be wondering why no one can agree on how to spell Arabic words in our Roman alphabet. I found an article, Arab Gateway: Romanization of Arabic, discussing this topic. It starts with a brief discussion of Lawrence’s random spelling — which, by coincidence, I had just read about last night, in the preface to The Seven Pillars of Wisdom:
In 1926, when T E Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) sent his 130,000-word manuscript of Revolt in the Desert to be typeset, a sharp-eyed proof-reader spotted that it was “full of inconsistencies in the spelling of proper names”.Among other things, the proof-reader noted that “Jeddah” alternated with “Jidda” throughout the book, while a man whose name began as Sherif Abd el Mayin later became el Main, el Mayein, el Muein, el Mayin and le Muyein.
Lawrence refused to change the spellings.
“Arabic names,” he replied, “won’t go into English, exactly, for their consonants are not the same as ours, and their vowels, like ours, vary from district to district.”
Frankly, I can’t imagine spelling the same word differently within my own manuscript.
The first problem in transcribing from the Arabic alphabet to the Roman alphabet is a problem for transcribing any language into the Roman alphabet: multiple European languages use the Roman alphabet, all differently. Thus, “Shaheen” and “Chahine” can both represent the same Arabic name as written by an English speaker and a French speaker.
The second problem is that not all Arabic speakers pronounce Arabic words the same. Pronunciations differ from region to region. Which pronunciation to you choose as the basis for your phonetic spelling?
The transcription can also go letter by letter (in what linguists call “transliteration”):
A different approach is to start with Arabic words in their written form and transcribe (or “Romanise”) them by replacing individual Arabic letters with corresponding letters from the Roman alphabet. This sounds simple but is actually very difficult. For example:
- Only eight Arabic letters have a clear equivalent in the Roman alphabet: B, F, K, L, M, N, R, and Z.
- Arabic has two distinct consonants that approximate to the sound of S. The same applies to D, H and T.
- There are two glottal sounds that do not obviously correspond to any Roman letter.
All this makes it very hard to know whether two names are, in fact, the same name — and it makes it very hard to look anything up in an electronic archive!