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| quote: | Originally posted by Marcus Summers
It is simply a phonetic interpretation into Latin alphabet from Arabic. For example, I've seen Kandahar spelled Qandahar. Does it really matter? No. As long as it is said correctly, afghans will know what you are talking about. Romanization of Arabic, Pashto, Dari, Urdu, etc. sucks and can't really truly interpret the language based on it's tones and sounds, etc (I'm sure Lira can explain it better than I) |
Oh hai! Here's a brief explanation in case anyone wants to know why Usama Bin Ladin's name is also Romanised as "Osama Bin Laden":
The Sounds of Arabic
As you probably have noticed by now, not all languages sound the same. There are sounds in English that are not exactly common around the world (e.g. "th"), and Arabic has sounds that aren't exactly popular either. To make things worse, this alphabet I'm using right now was specially crafted for a dead language (Latin), so you shouldn't be surprised to find a few quirks here and there in the spelling of any contemporary language that stubbornly uses this alphabet. And, not only there isn't a one-to-one relationship between Roman letters and most (if not all) languages spoken nowadays, what counts as a sound in a language may be interpreted as something completely different in another one. This is where Arabic comes in.
The Arabic script was used for the first time to write, predictably, texts in Arabic. There are several sounds in Arabic that simply don't exist in English (and didn't exist in Latin either) - writing these sounds can be very difficult, reason why Khaddafi has thousands of different spellings by now! - and there are sounds in these languages that don't exist in Arabic either (such as "p" and "v"). No, I don't know how an Arab that doesn't speak English would try to say "Porno Video", but they'd probably use the closest sounds they know and say "Burnu" "Fidiu".
Wait, Burnu Fidiu!? Whatever happened to the "e" and the "o"?
It turns out Classical Arabic had just three vowels (/a/, /i/ and /u/), which could be either long (as the "a" in "Bas") or short (as the "u" in عـُد, meaning "Come back, Bas!"). That's not as unusual as you might think - have you ever read an Inuit (Eskimo) text? These three vowels are all over the place because that's all they theoretically have. Naturally, some varieties of Arabic did change and come up with "e's" and "o's" such as Bas Arabic, but as far as I know, no one has ever bothered to develop a distinctly Egyptian script ever since the last Pharaoh died, so they've done their best with the script they already have.
So, in the end, "Usama" and "Osama" refer to the very same name, except one focuses more on the traditional spelling and the other on the pronunciation.
This being said, I don't speak Arabic fluently, so if a native speaker wants to make some amendments to this post, go ahead.
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