MANY PERSONS experience frustration when they encounter in their reading the varied current versions of the name of the weeping Iranian Premier. Their confusion is legitimate; a glance at some highly regarded journals on the desk discloses Mossadegh, Musaddiq and Mossadeq.

Which is the right spelling?

The fact is that any one of these versions is as right as any other. There’s a story of a proofreader sending a manuscript back to Lawrence of Arabia with a complaint that the author had spelled Hejaz, the name of the district of which Mecca is the chief city, three different ways. “Which is right?” he asked. Replied Lawrence: “All are right and I can give you 40 other spellings of it, all equally right.”

We have illustrated here the difficulty of rendering into English letters names and words from languages like Arabic and Russian which have alphabets differing markedly from ours. Many of the Arabic letters have no precise equivalents in the Roman alphabet; the same is true with the Russian. [Did they think Iranians were Arabs?]

The best we can do with Russian and Arabic names is to represent them phonetically. As in many cases, either one of several English letters or groups of letters will serve as well as another we get varied results. [sic] For example, in Russian letters there is only one right way to spell the name of composer Tschaikovsky but in letters of our alphabet it can be spelled twelve different ways, any one as right as another. They are all equally phonetic renderings of the Russian. In such a case all one can do is to adopt one generally used form and stick to it.

Editor—Re editorial under the heading of “Mossadegh is hard to Misspell.” Contrary to Laurence of Arabia, [sic] a foreigner to Arabic, whom you quoted as saying, “All spellings are right.” Allow me to say that your spellings Mossadegh, Musaddig, Mossadeg, are all wrong. [Misspelled the misspellings!]

Your first and third are totally wrong because the vowels o and e do not appear in the Arabic alphabet.

The Arabic word means “friendly” and the proper spelling is Musaadig.

As to your second way of spelling, it gives the man a totally different name meaning “believer”.

T. EZEIBAK. [misspelled!]
San Francisco.

[Hilda T. Zeibak (1913-2002)]

Editor—Re your editorial of August 2, 1952 “Mossadegh is Hard to Misspell,” and the letter to the editor of August 8, 1952.

Every time His Excellency, the Premier of Iran, sees his name in print spelled “Mossadegh,” doubtless he sighs and weeps bitterly. For there is a vast difference in meaning when spelled “Mossadegh” versus “Mussadiq” (accent on the last syllable) which is the correct way of spelling.

A Persian translation of the the name “Mossadegh,”especially when pronounced by many on the air, means the mount of Moses. To my knowledge there is no such mountain in Iran. Whereas, “Mussadiq,” in Persian means—tried, proven, and that is the correct way. I am certain His Excellency would prefer it that way.

LUTHER T. EBRAHIM.
San Francisco.

[Luther Timothy Ebrahim (1904-1986)]

One of the penalties of world power, as many Americans have sadly noted, the toil of learning how to pronounce and spell foreign names. The instance most recently noted is that of the Premier of Iran, Mr. Mossadegh. Newspapers in this country seem to have agreed on that spelling, probably because someone in the Associated Press office in New York decided it would do. [It’s also correct] But in Great Britain, as anyone can see from the dailies and weeklies there, such agreement has been reached. There are two main schools. The first calls him Mr. Mossadek; the second Mr. Mossadaq. [No, the most common spellings in the UK were Mossadeq or Mussadiq]

The difficulty seems to arise out translating in English the Iranian symbol which signifies the “K” sound. [His name has no “K” sound] In most oriental languages—I had to look this up—there are really two such sounds, one more guttural than the other. Apparently, when the guttural sound is written, learned people decided sometime ago that a good way represent it in English transliteration was by the letter “Q”. But the learned people haven’t managed to get this idea across to us laymen very generally, chiefly because a word ending in “Q” looks strange to us.

Still, that does not quite explain why the AP (or whoever it was) had to use Mossadegh. The ordinary “K” seems much simpler. [Answer: his name ends with a “G” sound]

As for the vowel difference, don’t ask me to try to explain it. Vowel shifts are so subtle and obscure that even the highest brows among the philologists don’t agree on the rules which govern them.