Misspellings
Omid Djalili, one of only a handful of Bahá’í stand-up comics, was recently featured in his very own One Night Stand on HBO.
Unfortunately, in the interview that’s featured on his HBO page, they’ve misspelled Bahá’í as “Bajai.” It’s disappointingly sloppy journalism, but it’s even more mystifying that out of all the people involved: the interviewer, the copy editor, the proofreader, and whoever put it on the web, not one of them was aware enough of the Faith to be able to catch the error. . . .
October 12th, 2005 at 8:53 pm
Maybe they were all hispanophones. Isn’t the spanish “j” (which is pronounced like the persian “kh”) often used as a substitute for the english “h”? If that’s the case, then, technically, it’s not misspelled at all (except it is)…
October 13th, 2005 at 10:12 pm
Good point, Dan. If you want to get technical, it’s actually spelled like this:
بهائى
The transliterations “Bajai” and “Baha’i”, are just that, approximate representations of the pronunciation of a word that is from a completely different language with a completely different script.
The only problem is, if someone is curious and does a Google search for “Bajai”, he isn’t going to get much useful information.
October 13th, 2005 at 10:42 pm
The point about the word only being a transliteration is well taken, but it doesn’t change the fact that there is a correct way to spell the word in English. Both Dictionary.com and Webster’s agree on Baha’i (sans diacriticals).
My objection in the inital post was that all of the people involved looked at the word, didn’t know what it was, and just decided to guess instead of looking it up. It’s not a question of it being 100% faithful to its Arabic rendering, but rather these people not caring enough to render it faithfully in the language of their choice (in this case, English).
October 13th, 2005 at 11:12 pm
yeah, it is pretty bad. maybe someone should register http://www.bajai.com just in case.
October 13th, 2005 at 11:13 pm
oops… I take that back. it already is registered.
oh well. I left a note at the ‘discussion’ link regarding the typo.