CIA Releases Nearly 470,000 Additional Files on Usama Bin

[Darat]

I've had a quick look and it seems the most important papers still haven't been released. That is the ones that show that Bin Laden was Obama's brother and how Obama protected him and the papers that document how Trump fired the shot that killed him*.



*I mean killed Bin Laden, although I suspect Trump would have preferred for it to have been Obama.

 

[CORed]

I've had a quick look and it seems the most important papers still haven't been released. That is the ones that show that Bin Laden was Obama's brother and how Obama protected him and the papers that document how Trump fired the shot that killed him*.



*I mean killed Bin Laden, although I suspect Trump would have preferred for it to have been Obama.

Well, I do remember that some time in 2008, I drove by a yard sign that I initially thought read "Osama bin Laden", but when I looked again it said "Obama Biden". Coincidence? I think not.

 

[CORed]

Point being, the question being asked is more properly "How should we spell his name in English?", and there really isn't a "right" answer ... because his name isn't English or any other language with recently common roots. The alphabet just doesn't contain the right representations.

So any spelling is necessarily an attempt at a phonetic rendition, which will depend not only on the dialect of Arabic being rendered but also on the dialect of English (or whatever) it is being rendered into, and the dialect of whoever is doing the rendering.

Some attempts may (or may not) be closer than others, but without rendering it in its native Arabic script it isn't ever going to be exactly right.

There doesn't really seem to be a standard (or more likely there are two or more competing standards) for transcribing Arabic into English. E.g. Osama or Usama? Koran or Quran? I'm sure I could come up with a lot more.