Will the real Mahmood please stand up.

For those of you who did not read the letter sendt by the Iranian president to the US President on may 7, I would recommend you do so. I will not discuss the letter here, as this is already covered in many other threads here on ATS.

What I want with this thread is to know the real name of the current Iranian president.

The letter is signed Mahmood Ahmadi-Najad - President of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

When I google this name I get 9890 hits.

Then, when I google Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, I get 7,860,000 hits.

A White House official confirmed to CNN that this is the exact English translation of the letter the White House received

I see from wikipedia that:
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, sometimes also transcribed into English as Mahmud, Mahmood, Ahmadinezhad, Ahmadi-Nejad, Ahmadi Nejad (Persian: محمود احمدی نژاد )
-so that pretty much explains it...

But isn't it strange that he refers to himself as Mahmood Ahmadi-Najad in a personal letter,
when "everybody else" knows you as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Strange yes. Conspiracy, nah.

Earlier threads on the letter:
Ahmadinejad sending Letter to G.W.Bush
Dear Pres. Bush......Regards, Mahmoud
Iran's letter


EDIT: wrong on the persian spelling

[edit on 12/6/06 by Vaak]

Osama's real name is Usama Bin Ladin. It is said he changed it because he didnt like the fact his name started with USA.

I wouldnt be surprised if we just didnt americanize this one just for kicks and grins.

This really is a problem of transliteration. You can't do a letter-to-letter translation of words in languages that use different alphabets, because it's pretty common for the letters in one language to signify a sound that's not phonemically distinct in another. Probably the easiest example of this for most Americans to recognize is the often-mentioned difficulty for native Japanese speakers to keep the /L/ and /R/ sounds in their proper place in English words. That's because, in japanese, those two sounds aren't phonemically significant, they don't change the meaning of a word. Which one is used, in Japanese, depends largely where in the word it falls.

Similarly, English lacks a distinction between the Arabic letters ق (qaf) and ك (kaf). The former is pronounced as an unvoiced glottal plosive (make a /K/ noise, but in the very back of your throat), while the latter is pronounced just like an English /K/.

Different people think that different combinations of letters more accurately represent the sounds, and adjust their spelling accordingly. That's why we end up with a hundred different variations of each name. One scholar thinks it's one way, another has his own variation, and the person in question likely has their own opinion that may not line up with either.