Ayrault Revisited: Once Again, it's Not "Slang"

It's a frequent problem that many Arabs refer to the spoken dialects of the language — the language they learned at their mother's knee — as "slang," when speaking to English-speakers; of course substantial numbers of Arabs do not even know the literary language. But even if we tolerate equating "slang" and the colloquial dialects (which I emphatically don't), most of the reporting on the Ayrault name transliteration problem still gets it wrong. That story went viral (not due to my posting it, alas) and a great many of the reports were similar to this one at CNN: "The prime minister's last name, it turns out, sounds like an Arabic slang word for penis."

True, others said that it was a case of having that meaning in certain dialects, which is technically true since only in some dialects is أيره pronounced like Ayrault's name, with an "o" vowel. But the word itself, is a perfectly good literary Arabic word with the same meaning, it's just pronounced ayruhu instead of ayro. But either way, it's still spelled  أيره . And the whole story centers around what it looks like on the printed page.

It appears in the classical dictionaries such as the Lisan al-‘Arab.and, below, in Lane's great multi-volume Arabic-English Lexicon. It's true that he defines several of its forms using Latin, but hey, he was writing in the Victoran era. And, "compressed?"

This is, I hope, my last word on this subject.

A New Burst of Commentary on Qadhafi's Name

The reported discovery that the (now former) Libyan Brother Leader's passport spells his name "Kathafi" has provoked a new wave of postings on the perennial, and easily overdone, issue of the multiple transliterations of Qadhafi's name.  Kal at The Moor Next Door and Issandr El Amrani at The Arabist have both addressed the question. I commented a long time back on this and other issues of Arabic transliteration,  quoting T.E. Lawrence's inimitable exchange with his proofreaders.

I would like to make the point that both Kal and Issandr make. Editors and commenters should stop saying there's a lot of confusion over how to spell Qadhafi's name. There is no confusion about how to spell Qadhafi's name: it's spelled معمرالقذافي. The debate is how to transliterate this Arabic name into other languages and writing systems and it is complicated by the fact that some of the letters are pronoounced differently from dialect to dialect, even within Libya.  But there's no doubt about how to spell it, since it's an Arabic name and is spelled only one way in Arabic.

"She was a Splendid Beast": The Arabic Transliteration Problem

I'm an editor. Editors have to decide how things are spelled. Arabic is not English. These three statements may be the only indisputable sentences to occur in this entire post.

In previous posts about the Arabic language and related issues, I've said I will deal with the question of transliteration sometime. It's time. I held off because it's one of those insoluble problems, since you can never really put a square peg in a round hole, and you can never really put Arabic into English, at least without so burdening the typesetter with macrons and diacriticals that it becomes impossible to read. That's true, I suppose, of all languages written in non-Roman alphabets, but there are only two or three ways of transliterating modern Hebrew, and two dominant ways of doing Chinese (Wade-Giles and pinyin). Why is Arabic such a problem? At least one site has come up with 32 transliterations of Qadhafi's [+31 alternates] name.

Somewhere earlier (forgive me, I'm too lazy to find the link), I've noted that the Guide of the Libyan Revolution seems to have achieved the signal distinction (aside from his claim of contriving the one universal system of world government, the Jamahiriyya) of having more tranliterations of his name than perhaps any other human being in history. This web page lists those 32 different ways to translate the name of the Libyan leader and Revolutionary Guide, Brother Colonel [insert transliteration here]. And they don't even include any versions with his kunya, Abu Minyar. Nor do they include diacritical marks, which produce wonders like the true "scientific" method of reproducing his name, which is beyond my HTML skills but would start with "al-Qadhdhafi", but with digraphs under the "dh" sounds, and a long vowel sign over the A. And as I noted sometime back, Libya is astride a major cultural dividing line which I, and many before me, informally refer to as the couscous line because it's where couscous supersedes burghul and other wheat grains; Tripoli sounds more like Tunis, Benghazi sounds more like Alexandria; the area in between, where Brother Colonel was born, sounds more like the Sahara. Libyans don't even agree on how to pronounce their leader's name, let alone spell it in Roman character.

An old Guardian article on the subject.

The reasons are multiple: though literary Arabic is a single language, its pronunciation varies from country to country; a transliteration that works for English does not work for French, so continental and English-speaking transliteration systems differ; loan-words and such also complicate matters. In North Africa, where local pronunciations often are far from the classical, the convention is to use the French tranlisteration, not the "scientific" English one: the average reader who is baffled by Bu Raqiba may have heard of Bourguiba. Don't even ask about Berber names. Then there are standard conventions: to refer to Cairo as al-Qahira sounds pedantic and obscures one's meaning; we don't write Köln for Cologne, or München for Munich, though we expect Germans to. And we don't write Baile atha cliath for Dublin, either, though a few ultra-nationalist Irish may. I once had an extended debate with the late Majid Khadduri, who helped found the Middle East Institute and was writing for it into his early 90s: he insisted that the holy city of Islam must be referred to as Makka. For years, we have used the conventional Mecca in the Journal. In the end I compromised on "Makka (Mecca)". We still get into debates with our authors over transliteration systems. In this blog I am a bit more liberal than the Journal itself is (we still say ‘Abd al-Nasir, not Abdel Nasser, because we've been doing that since before he was famous), but I recognize there are no perfect solutions short of what looks like a typographical disaster.

But the most famous of all comments on Arabic transliteration is certainly that of T.E. Lawrence ("of Arabia"), in a 1926 exchange with his proofreaders, which may be found here in part and reads, in full:

Q: I attach a list of queries raised by F. who is reading the proofs. He finds these very clean, but full of inconsistencies in the spelling of proper names, a point which reviewers often take up. Will you annotate it in the margin, so that I can get the proofs straightened?

A: Annotated: not very helpfully perhaps. Arabic names won't go into English, exactly, for their consonants are not the same as ours, and their vowels, like ours, vary from district to district. There are some 'scientific systems' of transliteration, helpful to people who know enough Arabic not to need helping, but a wash-out for the world. I spell my names anyhow, to show what rot the systems are.

Q: Slip 1. Jeddah and Jidda used impartially throughout. Intentional?

A: Rather!

Q: Slip 15. Bir Waheida, was Bir Waheidi.

A: Why not? All one place.

Q: Slip 20. Nuri, Emir of the Ruwalla, belongs to the 'chief family of the Rualla.' On Slip 23 'Rualla horse,' and Slip 38, 'killed one Rueli.' In all later slips 'Rualla.'

A: Should have also used Ruwala and Ruala.

Q: Slip 28. The Bisaita is also spelt Biseita.

A: Good.

Q: Slip 47. Jedha, the she-camel, was Jedhah on Slip 40.

A: She was a splendid beast.

Q: Slip 53. 'Meleager, the immoral poet.' I have put 'immortal' poet, but the author may mean immoral after all.

A: Immorality I know. Immortality I cannot judge. As you please: Meleager will not sue us for libel.

Q: Slip 65. Author is addressed 'Ya Auruns,' but on Slip 56 was 'Aurans.'

A: Also Lurens and Runs: not to mention 'Shaw.' More to follow, if time permits.

Q: Slip 78. Sherif Abd el Mayin of Slip 68 becomes el Main, el Mayein, el Muein, el Mayin, and el Muyein.

A: Good egg. I call this really ingenious.

Since I can't top that exchange, I'll stop now.