Monday 15 June 2009

the world's most beautiful person

Yes, yes, I fooled you. This is actually a post about transliteration. The front of the Financial Times today is about the Iranian elections, as won by some guy called Ahmadi-Nejad. I mean, what? Surely we've settled on a convention. But no, The F/T has to be better than everyone else.

(Note: it's raining really hard and I should be going out into it in a few minutes. I'm talking wet, wet rain.)

There's a Pakistani fast bowler whose been called, for years, Umar Gul. It's on all the screens when he comes out to play. The commentators call him UmARR Gul, some of them as if they're doing a pirate impression. On the back of his shirt, however, is the word 'UMER'.

(Lightning too. I dare say many of you are experiencing something similar. I love rain.)

In a different spelling issue, the incompetents who make the England cricket kit have sent them out with such dodgy lettering that the two batsmen currently at the crease are representing 'E LAND' and ' LAND' respectively.

1 comment:

Matthew Green said...

The Cambridge Russian Tripos insisited on the use of the Library of Congress transliteration system and would penalise daring students' jaunty use of the Oxford or COMECON versions. The Congress system would generate such tongue-twisters as Pietr Chaikovskii, Fedr Dostoevskii and Boris El´tsin, names which would be recognisable to a machine, although not necessarily a human being.