Turmoil in the Middle East
The situation in Lebanon is truly horrific. I was shocked that after hearing the smooth-talking Israeli Foreign Minister outline their plan on The 7:30 Report I almost thought it was a completely legitimate policy to bomb a country into oblivion and then open negotiations. Everything’s so messy over there that I can barely form an opinion either way, but there’s one particular, far less controversial, aspect which befuddles me.
How do you spell Hezbollah?
All the Australian news (i.e. ABC Online) seems agreed on the above spelling. But then I was reading TIME.com and found that they prefer “Hizballah”. Well, I thought, I’m sure we can clear this up. I’ll just google it. There’s bound to be a simple answer.
Ahem. Potential spellings of Hezbollah include:
- Hezbollah
- Hizballah
- Hisballah
- Hizbollah
- Hezballah
- Hizbullah
- Hisbollah
- Hizb’ALLAH
- Hizb Allah
I eventually found my way to Wikipedia (I would have gotten there straight away but I, er, spelled Hezbollah incorrectly). Those last ones there give an insight into the word: turns out translating from Arabic is tricky sometimes. “Hizb” means “party”, and you may remember “Allah” (God) from some of his previous work. Apparently the Lebanese dialect gets Hizb closer to Hezb, hence some of the confusion. Wikipedia claimed that Al Jazeera used the final spelling but a quick check reveals them to conform with the very common “Hezbollah”.
I hope I’ve cleared that up for everyone. I expect I’ve missed some vital piece of the puzzle where all the confusion was started as a plan to vaguely irritate the party into surrendering.
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Andrew
July 23rd, 2006 at 11:21 pm
This type of ambiguity has been annoying/intriguing me since 9/11. It is often fun watching as some new crisis breaks out and the various news organizations try to reach a consensus as to how they should spell a word. Initially there was a fairly even split between Americans fighting insurgents in Falluja and Fallujah but the latter quickly became the almost universal convention. Abu Ghraib also had some interesting variations. It is also the cause of many of the problems associated with people being put on terrorist watch lists, since any jihadist worth his salt will have a dozen variations on the spelling of his name (and hence a dozen times more people who happen to share one of his names, try to get on a plane, get pounced on by a team of undercover FBI agents, are blindfolded, drugged, put on a plane to Egypt, tortured for a few months and then quietly let go when they realise he might not be THE Mohammed al Bloggs.)
The source of the problem is that there is no standard rendering of Arabic in the Roman alphabet, so the transcription is usually the best approximation in English to the sounds the Arabic speaker makes. But different parts of the Arab world have different dialects and pronunciations hence the inconsistency (try to come up with a phonetic spelling which would univerally represent the way a Jamaican, a Texan, a Queenslander and a Yorkshireman speak English). So Muhammad/Mohammed and al Qaeda/Qaida. Another problem is that in Arabic (as in Hebrew) the short vowels are not generally written (there are in religious texts, or where clarification is necessary — they are the dots above and below the ‘squiggly’ letters) making a direct transcription more difficult still.
At least once such complex and important issues as spelling are solved, the final border of a Palestine state, the right of return of refuges and the future of Jerusalem will look like fairly trivial matters.
Andy
July 23rd, 2006 at 11:50 pm
I’ve long been a campaigner for punctuation and spelling and I feel that if they all spoke english as their only language it would be substantially easier to get along.
I think we need walls in the Middle East separating everyone from everyone else. The Berlin and Great Walls are shining examples of the effectiveness of walls. I hope the American / Mexican Wall gets built. Isn’t it said “Great walls make great neighbours?”