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Comment by defen | Hacker News Reader

> But it is very rich in vocabulary. Arabs love parallelism in writing, and seem to have three versions of every word for that purpose.

English-only speaker here. I've seen about 50 different variants of "Muammar Gaddafi" rendered into English - is this due to different ways of Anglicizing the same name, or does he really have a 50 different ways of writing it, or something in between?

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Just because of Anglicization and no standard way to do this. His name has 2 Arabic letters that are not found in English, 3ain and Qaaf. The rest of the variation is also due to English not having a consistent way to spell itself and no consistent way to transliterate Ar --> En.

You can also see this in the most common Arabic name as well: Muhammad. Some spell with three ms, some 2. Some spell with u and some with o.

Personally, to be pseudo-unique snowflake (and to give myself a leg up in SEO) I spell my name a little unusually as 'Mohomed'.

actually three letters, there's also the Thal, which is like a "d" (Dal) with a point on top of it, and pronounced as a deep version of "th." So it's basically Qathafi. But given the fact that there's a "chaddah" on top of it, all hell breaks loose when you're trying to write it in English.

Yep, forgot about the thaal. And yes, the shaddah is one of the big reasons for different spellings, some choose to put one meem in Muhammad (like I do), some try to be more "purist" and put double as is normal spelled in English. Mu3ammar has one shaddah on the second meem and a another shaddah on the thaal in Ghaddafi.

There's some discussion of this exact topic on Language Log here:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2989

From the post and the comments I found the following two links interesting:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/02/libya

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/513/how-are-you-sup...

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