You Say Qadhafi and I Say Gadaffi

Ah, all these questions presuppose that there is an answer. Sorry, but life and transliterating Semitic languages are not for the faint of heart or sticklers for clarity. Our problem, you see, is not simply the rendering of Arabic sounds in the Roman alphabet; it is also a question of the specific dialect in Arabic.

Just to show you that Arabs and Jews share something in common--besides wanting the same piece of real estate--we Jews cannot agree on how to render our own, uh, Festival of Lights known variously as: Chanukah, Channukah, Hannuka, Khannuka, Hanukka or even Chanakah.

Part of our shared challenge are the sounds that don't have English equivalents. The Ch or Kh in both languages are not Ch as in churlish or church. They are Ch as in Loch Lomond. It makes a kind of gargling sound, kind of like clearing your throat. Then there is the hard guttural Q as in Quran. It is far back in the throat and made like a K with a glottal click. Okay?

Now it gets to be fun. Gadaffi should probably be spelled pretty much as the New York Times spells it: Qaddafi. The Arabic letter in his name is that guttural Q. But almost all of the classical Arabic words starting with Qs are pronounced as guttural Gs in the Bedouin dialect spoken in North Africa--particularly by the Gadafa tribe to which Gadafi belongs.

If all of these insertions of sounds and differing pronunciations seem strange, just consider our dialects, Bostonian in particular, and the disappearance of the R sound in Harvard and its mysterious re-appearance in their version of Cuba--Cuber.