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Contact lunacy4/4/2023 ![]() Gaselee was right, but he was a scholar and, as a lot of us can testify, purely scholarly views are rarely popular. Yet, the difference is not without importance – for instance, ‘kalb’ means ‘dog’ while ‘qalb’ means ‘heart’. The sound we now transcribe as q is almost impossible to pronounce correctly for a non-native speaker – I certainly can’t! It is a sort of k sound coming from the very back of the throat, which most people end up pronouncing as a normal k. There are two letters in Arabic having more or less a k sound, one more explosive than the other and it seems convenient to allot q to one of them, the more explosive of the two.’ ‘I am in favour of the spelling Iraq in spite of the unfamiliarity in English of a q not followed by a u. ![]() Stephen Gaselee, the Librarian and Keeper of the Papers at the Foreign Office, was (somewhat disloyally) in favour of the spelling Iraq, and explained: In 1924, the Colonial Office wrote to ‘invite the attention of Mr Secretary Ramsay MacDonald’ to the fact that ‘the correct spelling of the word was “Iraq”, and not “Irak”’ ( FO 371/10119). The Foreign Office did have a representative on the Committee, but thought its rules weren’t binding and that there was no reason why they should change their spelling habits. Unluckily for the Foreign Office, they had until then favoured Irak ( FO 371/10119).įirst list of names in Iraq, Permanent Committee on Geographical Names, August 1922 (catalogue reference: FO 371/10119) Luckily for the Colonial Office, this was the way they had always spelt it. In August 1922, the newly established Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use ruled that the correct spelling for Iraq was ‘Iraq. ![]() With Iraq, however, it was an entirely different matter. The Northern Department of the Foreign Office noted that they didn’t feel very strongly about it because it seemed ‘silly to risk annoying the Esthonians for the sake of a letter’ ( FO 370/217). In November 1926, the Estonians asked the British Government whether they could possibly be so kind as to stop spelling them with an ‘h’. It was therefore quite heartwarming to find out that the Foreign Office and the Colonial Office had been squabbling over a very similar matter almost 100 years ago. While working on our interactive First World War map, my team and I had to decide whether we should use the modern spelling of country names or the old one (Serbia/Servia, Romania/Roumania, Sudan/Soudan…) and then convince others that we were right. ![]() It is always comforting to realise we’re not the only ones dealing with trivial issues which take ages to resolve. ![]()
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