Osama:
A commenter on the Adolf Hitler Campbell birthday cake thread asked: "What if the kid's name were Osama?" Of course, I take it that the question was likely to ask, "What if the kid's name were Osama Bin Laden Campbell?" But taking the questioner at face value, I looked it up, and found that Whitepages.com reports 1342 Osamas in the U.S., 19 of the Osama Ahmeds, just a bit fewer than the 1535 Adolfs, though many more than the 14 Hitlers (as a first name, mind you) and the 219 Stalins -- Osama has apparently long been a pretty normal Arabic name.
A cool search feature, incidentally, though I don't know how reliable it is.
Always suspected that Kerr guy was just a sockpuppet for Kos!
(and I suspect the 44 "Volokh" last names returned by whitepages.com probably doesn't even account for Professor V's extended family, eh?).
I suppose a comparison would be to ask how many kids were named "George" in about 1943 to 1946 in honor of George Patton.
Huh? I get 2,487 Orins when I do the search.
The last time Orin was in the top 1000 was 1951. ;)
There are 1482 Maos. 13 Himmlers as first names, 200 as surnames. 247 first name Churchill. 2616 first name Delano.
Actually, you get zero results using the general www.whitepages.com site (a site I've had bookmarked for a loooong time). You get many results when you use the specialized "name popularity search" page, http://names.whitepages.com/
The probable reason for the discrepancy? Different databases being used by different parts of the same website, I suspect.
Thirty years ago, when he was named, few had ever heard of Osama bin Laden.
One of those 2,616 Delanos (first name) might well be my uncle. Born in 1935, he got stuck with that instead of Franklin.
If you don't include a last name, you don't get any results.
When you look at the kid's middle name though, there's not much room for doubt. Another newspaper article claims that the parents are both Holocaust deniers. But if there's any doubt that his parents are nuts at best, they named his sister after a prison gang.
These parents make bestowning names like Dweezle Zappa or god Slick ("with a small 'g', because we have to be humble about this", said Gracie) look benign.
Do you have any citation for the statement "Obama" is a variation of "Osama"? It seems highly doubtful to me since Kenya is not an Arab country.
There's a cornerback for the New Orleans Saints with that name - Usama Young - and I kinda feel for him. Bin Laden really ruined his name.
I am told that the Cyrillic alpahbet has a single letter for G and H. (Eugene? Sasha?) Hemingway alluded to this in Farewell to Arms, when Robert Jordan and the Russian agent are discussing the local pronunciation of the code name that the latter was using in Spain.
Many of the names in the KJV bear scant relationship to the Hebrew origianls because they were first translated into Greek, which lacked equivalent sounds for several of the Hebrew letters. Hence, e.g. Jacob for Ya'akov, Gemorah and Gaza for 'Amorah and 'Aza (with the ' representing the letter ayin, a strong glottal stop with no English equivalent), Abraham for Avraham, Abigail for Avi-gayil, Isaac for Yitzchak, and Sabbath for Shabbat/Shabbos/Shabbath.
Sorry, didn't keep the link. However, that Kenya isn't "an Arab" country has nothing to do with it. According to Wikipedia, Barak Hussein Obama, Sr. was a Moslem (or, born into a Moslem family -- by he got to Univ. of Hawaii he doesn't seem to have been practicing Islam). Arabs were sailing up and down the east African coast and trading and slaving long before Islam. "Barac" or "Barak" is the name of the Prophet's horse that in one night took him to Jerusalem where the Prophet ascended to heaven from the Dome of the Rock. Hussein or "Husayn" is the 3d Imam. Whatever the obvious Islamic associations with the President-elect's name, I suspect that more significant is that he is "Barak Hussein Obama, II".
Along the lines of your objection, I note that Spain isn't a "Jewish" country, but "Jesu" [a variation of "Jesus"] isn't an uncommon name. And, in the US, the names Peter, James, John, Matthew, Luke, Simon and Mary aren't uncommon.
Barak is actually from the root B-R-K--same sense in all Semitic languages--which means 'to bless,' 'blessing,' 'blessed,' or variations on the theme depending on vowelling, prefixes, infixes, suffixes and the like.
You're thinking of B-R-Q, 'lightning' in Arabic or Hebrew. Apparently, the 'q' is sometimes transcribed with a 'k' from Hebrew, says Wikipedia. Buraq is the legendary mount of Mohammad.
Qaddhafi or Kadafy? The LOC notes 20+ variant transcriptions of that name.
That one's Baraq with a Q, meaning lightning. The Hebrew cognate of Barack is Baruch, who was Jeremiah's disciple/secretary. That K letter, when it appears at the end of a word, automatically softens to a "ch" (as in "loch").
The above are the most informative/factual links I could find on the parts of Obama's name.
Here is a blog post which claims that Obama is a Swahili version of Osama.
Warning, that blog can see tin foil hat country from its house.
Less facetiously, if you google "Swahili for Obama" you can find some earlier pages making this claim. I'm too lazy/disinterested to try to figure out which one is earliest, though.
Baruch as in blessed, is spelled with a Kaf, which falls in the alephbet in about the same order as K does in English, and, as Millhouse pointed out, softens to a more guttural sound depending on its position in the word.
Kaf and kuf look very different from one another in Hebrew. I can't say as to their cognates in Arabic.
True, John. That's another variation of the spelling.
I hadn't heard of that explanation. Thanks. Then again, Semetic languages frequently leave out vowels, so, and as noted above, "q", "c" and "k" seem to be somewhat interchangeable over time, that there may be multiple historical meanings isn't surprising. Before Noah Webster, English spellings had a lot of variations, too.
Still, despite the tin hat sites, I'll stick with my conclusion that "II" is the give away for the source of the President-elect's name.
Thanks, Eugene. I know a number of people from the FSU who tend to pronounce the English "H" as you described, but many of them were from Belarus and not Ukraine. I've also been told that Hurwitz and Gurwitz are regional variations of the same name. Is this related to the differences you noted between Ukrainian and Russian pronunciation?
Typo. There are only four. And I'm only assuming they are women.
The KH sound is sometimes considered an H sound, though, and is often likened to the Scottish 'ch' as in 'loch'. Arabic also has a 'big' H, which is aspirated more than in English; a 'little' H, similar to the English H (except at ends of words, when it, too can be silent, or at least not heard).
If schadenfreude is your thing, great mirth is to be had in listening to someone whose mother tongue is French try to manage these sounds!
And yes, Semitic languages are based on tri-consonantal roots. Classically, none of the languages used even markers or diacritical marks for the vowels. Variations in the vowelling can result from regional difference, changes in tense or voice, or sometimes for sheer euphony. It makes it a bitch for students to keep straight.
But then, since even the 'dotted' consonants weren't dotted (i.e., marked with dots to distinguish them form one another) until relatively recently, there are a lot of words with the same meaning, but listed in different parts of the dictionary because of just how they were dotted.
The original Quran was not vowel-marked, which leads to some interesting (and sometimes tedious) discussions/arguments about exactly which word was originally intended. The whole book got 'marked' up no later than the 10th C, but that, in my opinion, leaves a lot of room for mischief or mistake.
The languages of Southwest Asia (I had to invent this term) as well as South Asia have a larger variety of guttural sounds of g/k line than most European languages. Hebrew, not surprisingly, mirrors Arabic in the assortment of script symbols, but some phonetic distinctions in contemporary Hebrew speech have disappeared. Interestingly, languages from that region belonging to very different families have this large diversity. E.g., Georgian has 5 gutturals (3 voiceless, 2 voiced), while Hindi has 7, although some are early borrowings from Persian (in particular the counterpart to the Russian X - see below).
As for the Russian and Ukrainian G/H, Russian H (that looks like X, and is ineptly spelled as KH in English, as in Khrushchev) sounds more like the Spanish J or Dutch G, but less harsh. Thus Russian lacks the phonetic equivalent of the English "h". It has been spelled with either letter historically. For instance it's Guver (for Hoover) but Xeminguey (for Hemingway). The Ukrainian G is actually closer to the English "h", except it's voiced. The letter "h" in West Slavic languages is more like the Ukrainian G.
That was from" For whom the bell tolls"
Also, there once was a Jew in New York City named Adolf Hitler. When asked why he did not change it, he said that he had it first.
The same answer was given by an American writer named Winston Churchill when the British one asked him to change his name.
I once saw a newspaper photograph of an English-language document signed by Bin Laden. He used "Usama."
That was a pretty heavy film.....
Actually, I was thinking:
I was thinking one could substitute 1790-1793 for the date range and George III for George Patton and get a better comparison.
It might be more relevant to note the use in the U.S. of Aaron, Abraham, Amos, Asa, Benjamin, Caleb, Daniel, David, Ebenezer, Elihu, Elijah, Elisha, Enoch, Ephraim, Ezekiel, Gideon, Isaac, Jared, Jeremiah, Jesse, Joel, Jonathan, Joseph, Joshua, Lemuel, Levi, Michael, Moses, Nathaniel, Noah, Reuben, Samuel, Seth, and Zachary by distinctly Gentile individuals.
As to Orin: it can't be that rare. My 18-month-old neighbor is named Orin.
You're right of course; all the more embarassing in that I never read Farewell to Arms.
I'll raise you Eli, Eliphelet, Jacob, Matthew and Simeon. We could add quite a few women's names as well, starting with Abigail, Deborah, Leah, Rachel, Rebecca and Sarah.
Actually, it's Qa-daffy duck
When I input "Orin Kerr", the result is:
However, the result for the surname "Kerr" is:
And of course, there's no "H" in Sasha. Only a Sha. ;-)
When I lived in California, my next door neighbor was named Adolph. And he was named after "the" Adolph. he was born in Germany in 1942.
It is an interesting site. "1530 or fewer" seems to be the default for unusual first names. Thanks for sharing it.
The more Germanic spelling "Adolf" was much less popular in the U.S. even before Hitler came to power, making its last appearance in the top 1000 names in 1928.
But clearly, Hitler did not poison the name "Adolph" completely as a given name in the U.S.
There is another name which seems to have suffered a much more severe drop in recent years possibly due to its use by a public figure, but bringing it up in this particular comment would make people would think I was comparing her with Hitler, so I'm not going to mention it in this particular comment.
If you want to guess what name I mean, you can try names out at the SSA web site under "Popularity of a Name".
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