Irridium said:
MikailCaboose said:
Polaris19 said:
Fox News got it wrong about eight times. First it was Obama bin Laden, then it was Usama bin Laden. I think it went downhill from there.
This is hilarious though...
Almost EVERY news station got "Osama" wrong.
Because "Osama"
is wrong. His real name is "Usama", it was just changed in the west because its first 3 letters spelled "USA".
Excuse me whilst I remove my forehead from my palm.
Alright. Now, first order of business... did you consider that maybe Usama's name originally is spelled using something other than the traditional Roman alphabet? That, above and beyond anything having to do with the first three letters of his name, has a lot to do with it. If you want further confusion, try romanization from Chinese,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language#Romanization
which uses many different accepted systems, including one agreed by Chinese people to be right, and one agreed by English speakers to actually look like it sounds. The funny thing is about half the Chinese words, people, and cities we know in English come from one system, and half from the other. This problem with Romanization happens with any language that doesn't use Roman characters.
So no, neither Osama nor Usama are his real name technically. أسامة بن لادن is his real name (and that's read right to left, by the way) (and also, thanks @Ketsuban, I'm not good at typing in Arabic.) You want one way to be right? Make a system accepted by everyone who uses Arabic characters for their written language, as well as people in the West. And hope no one comes after you with a system that more closely matches the pronunciation, or is simpler or shorter to use.
