My understanding of the Israel-Hezbollah Conflict
I intended to post this a week or two ago, but the Syria/Lebanon/Israel/iran issue is rather complicated. It's taken me a lot of reading to untangle the threads and make sense of what's going on over there. Incidentally that's my major problem with almost every opinion piece I've seen written about the issue: there are many uncomfortable truths
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There is no right way. You're suffering under 3 different Arabic-Latin transliteration systems. TE Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia) said it best:
"Arabic names won't go into English exactly, for their consonants are not the same as ours, and their vowels, like ours, vary from district to district. ... There are some 'scientific systems' of transliteration, helpful to people who know enough Arabic not to need helping, but a washout for the world ... I spell my names anyhow, to show what rot the systems are."
I studied Mandarin for a few weeks. People learning the Chinese languages suffer from the same transliteration problem as Lawrence mentions. For example, in Mandarin, there's a handful of consonant sounds that have absolutely no analogue in Western languages. Other consonants have rough analogues, but only under certain accents. Mandarin's vowels don't sound anything like ours either. Often, they have 3 or 4 variations on a vowel we only have 1 for, and vice versa. And don't get me started on tones.
When you try to stuff all these foreign consonants and vowels into the Latin alphabet, it just doesn't work. The sounds don't line up.
It's a miracle the Pinyin system for Mandarin exists at all. Cantonese still has 3 or 4 competing transliteration systems to this day, despite extensive Hong Kong and Taiwanese trade with the West.
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What usernameguy said, and note also that, as Hezbollah translates to something like "Party of God", some people like to see "A" in the second and final vowel slots to line up with the conventional spelling of "allah": Hizb'allah.
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