Taliban or Taleban?

[gary baldy]

Just reading the news and the BBC refer to the Taleban yet i always thought it was Taliban.
Are there two different groups or is this a Nestles / Nestle - Oil of Ulay / Oil of Olay - Jif / Cif type thing where someone just decides to change the name of something and no one questions it?

[Quizmonster]

Spelt with an 'i' or an 'e'...it makes no difference. Both are just variants of the same basic word. It's the same as 'Muhammad' or 'Mohammed'.
The name 'Taliban' comes from Arabic and in that language simply means 'students'. In the case of Afghanistan, they were specifically religious students. That is, they attended 'madrassas', where they were taught about the Koran and the Islamic faith and not much else. These men then fought, alongside less fanatical allies, against the Russians who had invaded their country. After that war, with Pakistan's help, they slowly took over all of Afghanistan and - as a Government - applied the harshest possible interpretation of Islam to the people. Osama bin Laden fought for them against the Russians and afterwards. That is why they insist on protecting him and why America and Britain etc are still determined to destroy them.

[jno]

It's a transliteration thing: the word is Arabic, and English speakers can't quite agree on what is the best way to represent the sounds in English. Same with Peking and Beijing: not a change of name, just a new way of writing it down.
Dunno about Olay and Ulay, though - weren't they Saddam's sons?

[n00dles]

Your right about name changing garibaldi LOL :o)

When Oil of Ulay was first marketed, the adverts stressed it was pronounced OOOLAY.....this did not catch on!?!, so they reverted to saying ULAY, now have changed again to OLAY!?!. Nestl� (being Swiss) was in fact pronounced NESTLAY, but us Brits just called in NESSELS. Jif changed to CIF, in keeping with European marketing (EU). Dime bars, now DAIM (mentioned in posting couple of weeks ago), for the same reason (EU), had this name in other European countries initially.

xXx n00dles

[Peter Pedant]

Arabic is pretty short on vowels
aleph yey and waw are the long ones - although there are more than three long vowel sounds
and the short a, i and u are diacritical marks above those wiggly letters. [teshkila] and yes there are more than three short vowel sounds.

So do you transliterate the diacritical mark or the sounds

Please argue for the next three hundred years.

Oh, did I tell you about the three pairs of allophones in Arabic ?

Ok Pushtu isnt Arabic, but you can see what I mean.....

[Narolines]

Weren't there a couple of pairs of allophones going cheap on E-bay recently? (Or were they going beep-beep?)

PS - why can't we use bold or italic type any more?

[n00dles]

Hi Narolines

We can, I mean, we can

will send it on next post if u like?

[n00dles]

arrow pointing west <
letter b (for bold)
arrow pointing east >

word or words

arrow <
forward slash /
letter b
arrow >

for italics substitute i for b

[Narolines]

Ah - I see! I was a bit miffed about the quick edit buttons disappearing! Thanks!