Listening to the senate hearings on the radio on the way in this morning, I continue to be amazed at how many different ways people pronounce the name of that Iraqi prison, Abu Ghraib. Everyone seems to be OK with "Abu", but I've heard, off the top of my head, "grayb", "greb", "grob", "gah-rob", "gah-reb", "ger-reb", and "gah-rayb" at least. Often one person would use more than one pronunciation in the course of discussion (perhaps confused, like me, and trying to cover all bases). Kinda makes me curious which pronunciations (if any) are correct.

Maybe this variety and seeming casualness comes about because English (at least American, which is all I can speak to, as it were) is not as strict about pronunciation as affecting the meaning of a word. Not like Chinese, where (to use the classic example) "ma" can have four different meanings, including "mother" and "horse", depending on the intonation used when saying it. I suppose it doesn't help that there doesn't seem to be one agreed-upon system for transcribing Arabic into English (again an example with Chinese, the current Pinyin system spells the name of the Chinese capital "Beijing," which is closer to the way actual Chinese citizens pronounce it as opposed to the older, less accurate "Peking", cf. also "Mao Zedong" < "Mao Tse-tung").

I wonder if Arabic is much concerned with intonation or pronunciation. I have no idea. Despite my notion that there are different systems for spelling Arabic words in Roman letters, I've only seen the "Abu Ghraib" spelling so far in this case.

Of course, at least one senator also had trouble with General Tokuba's name, which seems nearly phonetic to me, so maybe it's just a reading problem. My mom blames her trouble with spelling on the way she was taught to read, using whole-word flashcards. She says unless she really pays attention, she mostly just sees the size and shape of a word, the beginning and ending letters, instead of registering what all the letters in the middle are. Considering she's in the same general age range of many senators, maybe some of that is going on there too.

Not that I should really talk. I've been known to create quite original pronunciations for words if I encounter them in print before I hear someone say them. So I'll just shut up now.

contents of the purple tricycle are copyright 2004 carrie lynn king unless otherwise noted.