what's up with this "qaida" qrap on drudge?!

[frylock]

what happened to al Qaida, or al Qeada, or al Qaeda, or el Queso? Is "qaida" the plural of al-Qaida, kinda like cacti?

www.drudgereport.com

[Stew225]

1. I'm glad you asked this. I was going to ask this yesterday but

got distracted by something. I've seen this other places besides Drudge, too. What, are they saving space and energy by leaving the al off?

[Dogmudgeon]

2. They're variant spellings

There is no standard transliteration system for Arabic. Which is why we see al-Qaeda and al-Qaida, the Taliban and the Taleban, Osama bin Laden and Usama bin Laden, not to mention Mohammed, Muhummad and Muhammed (S.A.W.S). (The "S.A.W.S" part is the abbreviation of an Arabic religious honorific.)

In Chinese, there are two well-defined systems, Pinyin, used by the People's Republic since 1981, and Wade-Giles, used in Taiwan. We are more familiar with Wade-Giles. Mao Tse-Tung is Wade-Giles, and Mao Zedong is Pinyin. Peking is Wade-Giles and Beijing is Pinyin.

Before many European languages were "officially" written down, they had variant spellings, too. English and Basque are two of the best-known examples, since each language developed autoritative spelling and grammar only in the late 14th-early 15th centuries.

--bkl

[asthmaticeog]

3. I thought the "al" was a modifier.

Am I wrong on this or doesn't "al" translate directly as "the?"

As in "whoisthehedges."

[bloodyjack]

5. AL = "son of"

or "of such-and-such a place"

e.g., Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti = Saddam Hussein of Tikrit

[asthmaticeog]

6. AH! Thank you.

I thought "Son of" was "Ibn," just because to my ears it sounds etymologically similar to the Hebrew "Ben." Glad DU's around so my dumb errors don't go uncorrected.

[DieboldMustDie]

4. Randi said today that she's just going to call them "al" from now on.

:shrug: