Opinion: Libya: Even Kadafi isn’t sure how to spell his name
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Time may be running out for Libyan dictator Moammar Kadafi -- but it’s never too late to revisit the issue of why his name is spelled so many different ways when it’s rendered in English.
As my colleague Paul Whitefield noted earlier, the name is spelled Kadafi in the Los Angeles Times, el-Qaddafi in the New York Times and Gadhafi in the Wall Street Journal.
The reason, of course, is that different people apply different rules to transliterating the Arabic alphabet into our own Latin lettering.
Some of the problem stems from pronunciation. In the North African colloquial Arabic that Egyptians and Libyans speak, the name sounds like ‘Gazzafi.’ In Saudi or classical Arabic, it sounds roughly like ‘Kadafi,’ with a glottal ‘k’ sound that’s often transliterated as ‘q’ and a back-of-the-teeth sound halfway between ‘d’ and ‘th’ that’s transliterated as ‘dh.’
In academic papers, his name is usually rendered something like ‘Qadhafi,’ to let Arabic speakers know what the real letters are. But the L.A. Times long ago decided to give its non-Arabic-speaking readers a break and render the name in a way they could pronounce easily and (relatively) accurately.
Incidentally, Kadafi’s family foundation (www.gicdf.org) spells its name Gaddafi. Kadafi’s personal website spells it Al Gathafi (www.algathafi.org). So even the Kadafis can’t agree.
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-- Doyle McManus
