Comments on: Misspellings

By: dan jones

dan jones — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 21:13:59 +0000

oops… I take that back. it already is registered.
oh well. I left a note at the ‘discussion’ link regarding the typo.

By: dan jones

dan jones — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 21:12:24 +0000

yeah, it is pretty bad. maybe someone should register http://www.bajai.com just in case.

By: mcgee

mcgee — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 20:42:34 +0000

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).

By: dg

dg — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 20:12:36 +0000

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.

By: dan jones

dan jones — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 18:53:59 +0000

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)…