Gadaffi, Gaddafi, Gathafi, Kadafi, Kaddafi, Khadafy, Qadhafi, Qathafi … readers of news from North Africa know the name of Libya’s dictator comes in many versions.
The above list just covers the last name. There are several ways to spell the first as well, not to mention the question of whether to include the prefix “al-” or “el-” to the surname. In the book
Libya: A Modern History
, author John Wright noted there were 648 published versions of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s name, and that was in 1981.
Why are there so many ways to spell it in English?
First, transliterating an Arabic name — that is, making a roman-alphabet version of it — involves deciding on a consistent rendition. And for years, Col. Gaddafi refused to offer an official transliteration of his name. That allowed hundreds of versions to bloom. Second, there is no universally accepted way of transliterating Arabic into English, as there is (more or less) with Chinese, for example. Third, there cannot really be a correct way to spell Gaddafi in English anyway, since the Libyan leader’s surname — which is derived from the name of his clan, Gadadfa — can be pronounced different ways by different people in different parts of the Arabic-speaking world.
While similar issues bedevil almost every sound in the name, we can consider the G versus Q (versus K) question at the beginning of the surname.
Spoken Arabic includes four or five meaningful sounds — linguists call them phonemes — that English lacks. Formal dialects of Arabic, which are closer to the classical language of the Koran, have a phoneme called a “uvular stop.” This is produced by the uvula, the drop-shaped piece of tissue at the back of the mouth. The sound has been described as something like an olive catching in the throat. This is what is signified by the “Q” in versions of the name that use it, for example the U.S. State Department’s “Qadhafi.” The guttural uvular stop may not sound to anglophones like a posh way of speaking, but to Arab ears it is. However, “In everyday dialects, you hear Gaddafi with a ‘guh’ sound, as in ‘go,’ ” says Mohammed Sawaie, a professor of Arabic linguistics at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Va.
The G-spellings of Gaddafi reflect the pronunciation of the person on the street in Tripoli. Not surprisingly, given Col. Gaddafi’s tendency to speak to his people in relatively folksy Arabic on television, he himself appears to prefer the G-pronunciation.
magazine reported that after resisting romanizing his name for years after his takeover of Libya in 1971, the dictator sent a clue in 1986. He or his staff typed “Moammar El-Gadhafi” above his signature in a letter addressed to U.S. schoolchildren. But by then it was too late for the Roman alphabet-using world to rein in the myriad variations.
uses the spelling “Muammar Gaddafi.”