Grammar Moses: You say po-tay-to, I spell po-ta-to

Who exactly was it the United States killed on Jan. 3 that sparked a ramp-up of aggression between Iran and the U. S.?

Was it Qassem Soleimani?

Was it Qassim Suleimani?

Or was it Qasem Soleimani?

It depends which news source you read.

The first spelling is courtesy of The Associated Press. The "Qasem" variation is employed by The Washington Post.

The New York Times has been going with something completely different: "Qassim Suleimani."

The Daily Herald subscribes to both The Associated Press and Washington Post wire services, so we had to settle on one spelling for consistency. We decided to run with "Qassem Soleimani" because AP is our dominant source for world and national news and because we adhere to The Associated Press Stylebook (for the most part).

We were having this very conversation as Iran started launching rockets at the Ain al-Asad air base in Iraq, which houses U.S. troops.

The issue of the proper spelling of the Iranian general's name doesn't hold a candle to the gravity of the story at hand, but as a newspaper we sweat the details, too.

I can't imagine Iranians are having a lot of trouble spelling the man's name right. That's because they spell it as he did - in Arabic, a language that has an alphabet different from ours.

In case you forgot, our 26 letters are not the "English" alphabet but the "Latin" or "Roman" alphabet.

Changing words or names from one language to another without benefit of a shared alphabet is called "transliteration."

It's a predictable way to convert one character to another character or characters rather than by converting sounds, which is known as "transcription." Think phonetics.

With transliteration, it's easier to reverse engineer a word to its original language.

So, why the disparity in spellings?

For many clusters of characters there is more than one transliterative system. So you get variations, as with "Soleimani."

One reason could be that there are many dialects of Arabic. I imagine people have different interpretations of spellings because of that. But I'm no expert. If I were, I'd be working for the U.N. or code-breaking or something equally sexy.

When Ukraine became a hot topic of conversation last year after a certain phone call was made, I came to realize that after the country gained its independence its government established rules for transliteration of city names and such from Cyrillic into the Latin alphabet for legal proclamations and such.

And it changed "Kiev" to "Kyiv."

I'm not sure why that passed below my radar for 24 years or why mass producers of frozen "chicken Kiev" continue to use a spelling that's been out of vogue in its namesake for a quarter century.

With some languages there is just no easy pathway to English, which explains Hanukkah and Chanukah.

It's also why if you use the translation function on your Thai sister-in-law's Facebook posts to her friends about your shared trip to Mexico, you're left wondering whether you were on the same trip.

Write carefully!

• Jim Baumann is vice president/managing editor of the Daily Herald. Write him at jbaumann@dailyherald.com. Put Grammar Moses in the subject line. You also can friend or follow Jim at facebook.com/baumannjim.