Talk:Abdullah ibn Ali ibn Abi Talib

Transliteration

Hi Slatersteven, with regard to this: historical Arabic names are transliterated in a large variety of ways in the sources. However, one of the most widely used systems for romanization of Arabic is ALA-LC romanization, and for this reason our own system of transliteration as specified at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Arabic (WP:MOSAR) is closely based on ALA-LC. The way we normally go about this is that we use the transliteration scheme specified at WP:MOSAR except if a large majority of the relevant sources on the subject use a substantially different scheme (which sometimes happens in the case of late medieval or early modern Iranian or South Asian historical figures with names of Arabic origin). In this case we are talking about an early Arab figure, where use of WP:MOSAR is standard.

Now WP:MOSAR does not specify anything on how to transliterate عبد الله, but in the example here it does give "ʿAbd Allāh" (basic transcription Abd Allah), which is what you get when you simply apply the WP:MOSAR rules letter by letter. It is probably preferable to forms like "Abdallah" (which removes the space present in the Arabic) or "Abdullah" (which adds a nominative case ending "u", which is problematic because in some positions the name would need to change to "Abdillah" or "Abdallah" to remain grammatically correct; standard transliteration leaves out case endings for this reason). Long story short, "Abd Allah" really is better than "Abdullah" in all cases where "Abdullah" is not a modern wp:commonname (as established by the popular press or by the subject themselves writing their name this way in Latin letters) and we thus resort to transliteration (which we do for almost all historical names). Whether to transcribe ta' marbuta as "-a" or "-ah" (Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyya or Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyyah) is left open by WP:MOSAR, but "-a" is actually used much more often both in RS and on WP (again because "-ah" is in fact ambiguous), so changing it to "-a", while perhaps subject to WP:STYLEVAR issues, is not a bad move. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 13:06, 9 July 2022 (UTC)

That is only a proposed guideline, and I note "Common English translation" and google translate translates every source as Abdullah, so that seems to be the common English translation. Slatersteven (talk) 13:10, 9 July 2022 (UTC)

WP:MOSAR is only proposed because there was never a formal RfC for it, but I assure you that it is de facto quite strictly adhered to. Just type in "Abd Allah" in the search box and see what kind of articles you get, and then type in "Abdullah" and see what kind of articles you get when doing that. The former will all be historical Arab figures, the latter almost all modern figures. We have an established practice here which is based on scholarly usage, not on Google Translate. Please let experienced editors who know Arabic and who regularly edit these article do their work. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 13:19, 9 July 2022 (UTC)

Just to be clear: a common English translation of عبد الله would be "Servant of God". Translation is for stuff like People of the Book rather than ahl al-kitab. But we don't translate proper names, we transcribe them. If there is a common transcription for a specific subject (note that this is different for each different subject, even if they share the same name: some people are called "Muhammad", others "Muhamad", others "Mohamed", etc.: we are not going to call all of them "Muhammad" because that is the most common form of the name), we use that (Al Jazeera, Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, etc.). For historical subjects, we follow the sources in using a transliteration system (which is different from common transcription in that it systematically transcribes the same Arabic letters with the same Latin letters). This is the case here: the only thing open to discussion is how to transliterate. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 13:44, 9 July 2022 (UTC)