Comments on: Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab

By: Michael Lamb

Michael Lamb — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 11:44:26 +0000

I don’t think the mere fact of spoofery justifies “Al-Jazzera” or “news commentators … has asked the FBI, CIA and other … to create shorter nicknames”.

VoA’s guide is a close enough approximation to Arabic for plenty of Muslims, in Africa and elsewhere to have not much less difficulty with it!

By: Graham

Graham — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 13:46:03 +0000

I’m glad somebody’s found a site that gives some advice on this pronunciation. I spent some time the other day trawling through Google with no success at all. The BBC’s Unit hasn’t put anything on the News blog that they were using for a time. I think the BBC would balk at giving away a service like this that has cost it so much time and effort to build up, when its main customers would be the ‘opposition’ – ITV and Sky. However, if they have the time (and with a staff of only three these days, time is something they probably haven’t got spare), then a short daily list of names, with explanations of the reasoning behind the recommendations, would be welcomed by linguists around the world (and I can just hear Catherine saying “yeah, sure!”)

By: Jack Windsor Lewis

Jack Windsor Lewis — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 11:59:29 +0000

Well. Graham, Voice of America have helpfully supplied OH-mahr fahr-OOK ahb-duhl-moo-TAH-lahb which I shd think translates for British purposes mildly anglicised into /ˈəʊmɑː fəˈruːk ˈӕbdəl muˋtӕləb/ tho TAH suggests /tɑː/ which the VOA speaker makes so short it sounds like Arabic more than Americanised.
It’s something you and I often dont see eye to eye about but I’ve not noticed anything that’s bothered me from any of the many speakers I’ve he’rd broadcasting in this country. This reminds me obliquely of a constant thaut I have. Seeing that the BBC is a national service funded by the tax payer why can’t we all have the telephone access the Corporation’s employees all have to the Units database. I’d love to think that a few people besides myself feel this.

By: John Cowan

John Cowan — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 23:19:58 +0000

Questions of the form “How do you pronounce it?” are often met with “In which language?” or just with a shrug. My own father’s surname was re-pronounced by his high school football coach, and his siblings and their descendants have taken up the new pronunciation, though the older generation (now long dead) was supposely unaffected.

But what I was talking about is that the so-called “plea by some American newspeople” is just GlossyNews taking the mickey out of its readers. Which is what it does. Asking if that’s reasonable or a cop-out is to miss the point.

By: Graham

Graham — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 18:48:37 +0000

It would only be possible to make fun of the pronunciation if it was all over the place. Had American news organizations sorted it out – and in my experience, US fact checkers are far better than British ones, then this whole piece would have been redundant.
The fact that stress in Arabic is not stable is irrelevant. This man’s family is not Arab, but the father at least is well enough known that his own pronunciation should be familiar to someone accessible to journalists. Similarly the English-language name Powell is pronounced in two ways, but each individual bearer of the name has his preference, and that is what should count.

By: John Cowan

John Cowan — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 16:01:21 +0000

Stress in Arabic is not stable: it varies from one colloquial variety to another.

Here is a plea by some American news people for a simplification of difficult names. Is that reasonable, or a cop out?

One of us (you or me) needs to turn on the irony detector. Check out the headlines in the right-hand sidebar.