Mar 23, 2011

Is it Gaddafi, Qaddafi, Qadhafi, Gadhafi, or Kaddafi?

Posted Mar 23, 2011
To start my work day, I read some quick news or fun facts from Yahoo. Today I read about an Air Force pilot crashing (but surviving) in Libya who was lucky enough to have landed on a friendly territory. As I was reading, I noticed that the spelling of the Libyan leader was Muammar Gadhafi, and I thought, hmm… I thought it was Gaddafi or even Qaddafi! Even I was confused! In my previous post I consciously renamed Qaddafi to Gaddafi for a slight fear of misspelling his name.

I searched for the correct spelling and soon found out that there was no accepted western spelling for the name. News all over the world used their preferred spelling closest to the Arabic pronunciation. But since Wikipedia, Aljazeera and most of the articles I read spell it as "Gaddafi", I will follow the norm.

2 comments:

  1. direct translations of arabic names are futile. haha they mix up a with e, ou with oo or u, kh with gh, q with g... it's really futile.

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  2. Gaddafi, Gadhafi, whatever. I'm more concerned with his first name (is it?). Whenever I watch CNN, BBC, etc. I honestly perceive "Wammar Gaddafi"..Wammar..Wamar..and thought it was that for a while :)) Hi Mel, Wams! :p

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