Yesterday's discussion of Arabic transliteration prompted several emails from readers. One pointed out that Junblatt – the Lebanese politician's name – is usually written as Jumblatt in English. This seems to be a case of phonetics taking priority over the written form: if you say "Junblatt" quickly the N tends to turn into M.

Still in Lebanon, we also have Rafiq, Rafik and Rafic al-Hariri (with the C spelling the most popular according to Google). And let's not forget Gibran Khalil Gibran whose name changed permanently to Kahlil because someone put an H in the wrong place when he first registered for school in the United States.

Writing from Harvard, Mohamed El Dahshan (or should that be Muhammad al-Dahshan?) says: "There's more [than] 'preference and utility' to the way words are spelled: sometimes spelling reveals political differences and preferences. Hizb-allah, Hezbollah and Hizbullah, for instance, will be used by different people."

I've noticed this too. Israelis often seem to prefer Hezballah with an A in the middle, though I'm not sure if there's a political point to it.

Mohamed goes on to suggest that the Romanised spellings of Arabic names can help to identify a person's place of origin and that someone called Muhammad is more likely to be non-Arab than Mohammed.

The other side of this is when English speakers try to put a name or phrase into Arabic. A few years ago I was regularly getting emails from people wanting tattoos in Arabic. It seemed to start around the time David Beckham had his wife's name 
tattooed on his arm in Hindi, and eventually I set up a web page to answer the FAQs.

Having seen how Spanish souvenir shops around the Alhambra (sorry – al-Hamra') mangle their reproductions of the palace's Arabic inscriptions, I usually suggest Arabic tattoos are not a brilliant idea unless you're sure the artist knows what he's doing. 

A lot of the requests were for Arabic renditions of barely-translatable English phrases or names like "Vanessa" where I'd have to explain that Arabic has no letter V, so would she mind being "Fanisa" instead?

But tastes change. Yesterday, this email arrived: "I am tiling the backsplash of an Islamic [sic] friend in a stone tile. I would like to paint Islamic phrases on a few tiles ...(short prayers ... "happy" words ... not sure what would be appropriate) and would like some suggestions. Can you help?"