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Re: [RC] Arab Name - Maryanne Stroud Gabbani - Maryanne Stroud GabbaniOne of the biggest problems for translating names that are in "Arabic" is the fact that the Arabic alphabet is not at all the same as the western alphabet. We have letters that are not existing in English and are missing all the vowels. We also don't have a "p", for example. So when people write an Arabic name in English, it can be really difficult to figure out what Arabic word it relates to. I tried "Shezaad" and "Naazy" out on a number of friends and they all came up blank.Journalists try to standardise the spellings of names and places in transliterated Arabic but even that is tricky. My last name is Arabic, but because my husband was half Sudanese and liked the Sudanese family a bit more than the Egyptian family, he chose to spell it in English letters as Gabbani. All his brothers spell it in English as Kabbany. In Arabic the first letter of our last name is one that is often transliterated as a Q but in Sudan this Q is pronounced as a hard G, while in Egypt it isn't pronounced at all, making the pronunciation of my last name in Egyptian Arabic 'abbani. Clear as mud, right? Arabic chatters on the net have come up with their own solution to this by spelling out Arabic in English letters but using numbers to stand for missing letters. So for the rider that asked for the Arabic for Vision, the word is Ro2ya. Nice solution but it can drive English speakers crazy. Maryanne On Nov 10, 2004, at 9:57 PM, DRG1 wrote: Hi,
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