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In researching this river I came across a confusing number of different spellings and was somewhat at a loss about what to name the article. Eventually I decided on Bahr el Zeraf because the Bahr el Zeraf (river) page at the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names website says this is the "preferred" spelling. But it seems that "Zaraf" may be more common than "Zeraf", and the "el" is frequently rendered "az" or "ez", and sometimes with a hyphen and sometimes without. To further muddy the waters I found that the NGA Geonames website gives "Baḩr az Zarāf" as the "standard", with "Bahr ez Zeraf" as a variant. So I gave up trying to figure out the "best" spelling and simply made redirect pages for the variations. But I'm still not sure "Bahr el Zeraf" is the best name for the page. In any case, it is all transcriptions from Arabic, so maybe it doesn't matter. If anyone can add the actual Arabic name in Arabic characters, please do! Pfly (talk) 06:27, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
