A certain someone gave me the heads up on this great article.
“Transcribing Arabic into the Roman alphabet is fraught with difficulty. And in an age of electronic text, search engines and databases, the problem is only going to get worse, writes Brian Whitaker”
Very true. And maddening. I know of half a dozen (maybe more) ways to spell my middle name. I use the version that was on some of my great-grandmother’s documents, “Jamelieh”. But she wound up being buried with the Americanized “Amelia” on her headstone. And it’ll be near impossible to track down my relatives in Lebanon, should I ever get around to it. Especially difficult as Arabic was not passed down to my generation. If I were fluent in the language (I am limited to a few phrases, some a little, umm, colorful) it might be an easier task. Instead I have half a dozen romanized variations of the town we’re from, and the names of the relatives that were left behind.