Johnson

A COMMENTER asked, in my post on spelling "Qaddafi", "What about Muammar?"  Simpler than Qaddafi, but here goes.

معمر

The name above has four letters. (Short vowels aren't usually written in Arabic.) The first, "m" is straightforward.  The second is the hardest: it's called 'ayn in Arabic, and a "voiced pharyngeal fricative" by linguists.  The best nontechnical description I've heard is imagine the sound hip-hoppers make when saying "a'ight'. You can listen to it here. When names including 'ayn are transliterated, the letter often falls between two vowels: there's an 'ayn in Ba'ath, elBarade'i, and Mu'ammar in all the places indicated with an apostrophe.

The third "m" is pretty straightforward too, but it's doubled (there's a little diacritic sometimes written above it). Hence most transliterations give either Muammar or Moammar.  And the final "r" is pretty straightforward.

Why the o/u division?  English has two completely distinct vowels here. Arabic doesn't. Classical Arabic has just one vowel, roughly between the two. It's the same vowel in "Osama", which is why some people write "Usama", including the American government. Traditional scholarly practice is to write u, not o. Modern dialects vary a bit.

Bonus: what about his son?  Saif, Seif, Sayf and Seyf can all be used to transliterate the first part. It means "sword". His real "first name", though, is Saif al-Islam, "sword of Islam". Many western outlets use merely Saif, as I did in the other day's post, but official Economist style is Saif al-Islam for the son.