Abstract

Despite the fact that Persian and Arabic have somehow the same orthographies, the common names of Iranians and Arabs that originate from Arabic have different English spellings. The present paper aimed at addressing these differences. Firstly, different pronunciations of common graphemes in Persian and Arabic orthographies were scrutinized. Then, the differences between the English spellings of common names in these two languages were analyzed based on different pronunciations of these common graphemes. The corpus of English spelling of Arabs’ names was based on various acedemic sources as well as googling English spelling of Arab celebrities. However, the corpus of Iranians’ names spellings was based on the authors’ linguistic intuition and experiences regarding the customary and accepted methods in spelling Iranians’ names in English. Finally, the pronunciation changes of these graphemes from Arabic to Persian were analyzed within the framework of optimality theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993/2004) in order to specify which phonological processes they underwent and which constraints (rankings) caused the processes. According to the findings of the present paper, differences between English spellings of common names of Iranians and Arabs are generally due to different pronunciations of common graphemes in Persian and Arabic orthographies as well as the differences between their phonologies. Moreover, the degree of correspondence between English writing system and Persian/Arabic writing systems, in addition to the customary methods in transliteration are among other reasons why common names of Iranians and Arabs have different English spellings.