In a message dated 2001-10-03 10:13:26 Pacific Daylight Time,
jcowan@reutershealth.com writes:
> Stefan Persson wrote:
>
>> Do you write "al-Qaeda" and "Osama bin Laden" in English? In Swedish
>> newspapers it's written "al-Qaida" and "Usama bin Ladin."
>
> Usually. The U.S. media seem to prefer "Taliban" universally,
> but I have seen "Taleban" in publications from other anglophone
> countries. All these e's and o's in Arabic don't actually exist
> in the writing system, and are imported from the colloquial.
CNN does use the spellings I gave (which Stefan asked about), although
frequently they drop the hyphen from "al-Qaeda." John is correct about
"Taliban"; the BBC spells it "Taleban."
All these romanization discrepancies are exactly the reason I asked about the
"true" Arabic spelling in Unicode in the first place. Thanks to everyone for
their (on-topic) contributions.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Thu Oct 04 2001 - 00:31:28 EDT