Job Discussion Forums

[Mohammad]

First of all, thanks to the original poster for wishing happy fasting to the Muslims, please accept my apologies in delaying to thank you. Secondly, SJ, I don't see what is so difficult here; I am not talking about Khaled or Khalid, irrespective of how they are transliterated, they are still pronounced the same (at least by the majority) and the same is the case with Muhammed or Mohammad, etc. However, Muslim and Moslem are not pronounced the same, in fact, there's a big difference in the pronunciation of the two, therefore, Muslim would be the correct transliteration.

Regards,

Mohammad

[Bindair Dundat]

[Bindair Dundat]

[veiledsentiments]

Hey Richard,

I hope you haven't starved. The easiest place to find food in the middle of the day is in your own kitchen. I know that the hotels normally provide an area for their guests, but other than that... If you are referring to finding food while at work, we always carried food and the school provided us with a room to eat and drink privately.

Stephen,

You mention no problem with Khaled or Khalid... well... I had a whole class erupt into debate one day because I had two 'Khaled/Khalids' in the same class (who also had the same second name and the same tribal name). The debate wasn't over the spelling, but the pronunciation!!

I have also had students with both spellings very insistent on their choice.

How about the Ramadhan/Ramadan question?

VS

[Stephen Jones]

Dear Veiled

On the sub-continent it's 'Ramazan' :)

Then there is 'Riyadh' or 'Riyad'? The problem comes in that there are three letter 'd''s in Arabic and if we are not using diacritics we only have two possible transliterations into English 'd' and 'dh'. I followed the tradition of using 'd' as the transliteration of the final letter, because, apart from anything else it was what 'Riyad Bank' had (has?) on all its branches. From the reactions of some people you'd think I'd abducted their sisters.

Maybe 'Khaled/Khalid' is sometimes pronounced with a fatha and sometimes with a kasra. Or maybe there is a fourth vowel that is something inbetween that doesn't get into the books?

We have something like 20% of the names on the classlist mistranliterated by any standard. Some of the names become completely unrecognizable. When students complain I am mangling their name, I tell them to go to the registrars office and insist it is spelt correctly. So far only one student has taken the advice, but at least it shuts the others up.

The 'Guardian' style book elgantly sums things up with Anglo-Saxon restraint: "Though Arabic has only three vowels - a, i and u - it has several consonants which have no equivalent in the Roman alphabet. For instance, there are two kinds of s, d and t. There are also two kinds of glottal sound. This means there are at least 32 ways of writing the Libyan leader Muammar Gadafy's name in English, and a reasonable argument can be made for adopting almost any of them. With no standard approach to transliteration agreed by the western media, we must try to balance consistency, comprehensibility and familiarity - which often puts a strain on all three."

Incidentally the 'Guardian' uses 'Muhammad', so its consistent; it even says that "the spelling Mohammed (or variants) is considered archaic by most British Muslims today, and disrespectful by many of them". It doesn't say what the variants are, so school is still out as to whether Mohammad in this thread is dissing himself or not :)

[Stephen Jones]

[Stephen Jones]

This is another excellent article
http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,730805,00.html

[veiledsentiments]

Enjoyed the article, but I must say that I never noticed that the 'qaf' is pronounced as a 'g' by anyone but English speakers who don't know how to produce the proper sound of 'qaf.'

Every time I hear them say 'gutter' for Qatar on the news here, I want to scream...

VS

[Mohammad]

SJ,

You said in one of your earlier posts there are 3 d letters in Arabic, having studied Arabic for many years, I have come across 2 - د + ض only, please try and show me the third one. After all, I am only a student of the Arabic language.

Are you trying to suggest I am wrong in saying Muslim is the correct transliteration? I clearly demonstrated in one of my earlier posts how the word Muslim is spelt in Arabic and how Moslem would be spelt in Arabic. Ramzan is not an Arabic word, it's an Urdu word, Urdu is widely spoken in the sub-continent, and hence, they will use Ramzan.

My name is an Arabic name, and I pronounce it correctly, as it is supposed to be pronounced in Arabic. I ensure all Muslims and Non-Muslims alike, pronounce my as it's supposed to be pronounced. I have given you a breakdown of each letters in my name in Arabic, the transliteration may have different sound/s with respect to the Arabic haraqat, however, the letters are still the same. Whereas in Muslim and Moslem, there are two different letters in use, hence Moslem is incorrect and Muslim is correct.

You may carry on as you wish with words such as, Ramadhan or Ramadan, Ar-Riyadh or Ar-Riyad, Khaled or Khalid and all the others you can think of, the bottom line with such transliterations are, when they are written in Arabic, they are written with the same letters and pronounced the same irrespective of how they are transliterated.


Regards,

Mohammad محمد

[Gordon]

[Stephen Jones]