User talk:Tim Hawthorne

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Nūr ad-dīn al-'Azīz ibn al-Qamar
Hello, are you sure that name is right, as the Arabic and the transliteration do not quite match up. The exact page from the book you referenced isn't available on Google Books or Amazon so I could not check myself. Cheers, —Ruud 04:16, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

Hi Ruud, thank you! I must admit this is an experiment for me, so I appreciate your help.

My thinking was to start with a suitably obscure figure to test out the waters here at Wikipedia.

Actually I wondered if you would be able to change the article name to just "Ibn al-Qamar", which, like Ibn Rushd, etc. would be the common English usage (or advise me on how exactly to do this). The transliteration really should only be in the body of the text. Meanwhile you are correct, I seem to have accidentally wrote "al-" instead of "abd al-" -thanks for noticing this! I'll try to change that now.

I will also look at the links you sent me. Tim Hawthorne (talk) 03:11, 13 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Very new editors are not able to rename pages (your account will need to be a few days old and you should have made around 25 edits.) A guide for renaming articles can be found at Help:Moving a page. There currently are no real guidelines on the naming of biographies on people with Arabic names, but if there is only one Ibn al-Qamar that seems a good choice. I have renamed the article for you.
 * P.S. My Arabic is not very good, but, if I am not mistaken, there is still a stray Alif between the "Aziz" and "ibn". Cheers, —Ruud 18:52, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

Great. Yes there is only one that I am aware of, although I do seem to recall once coming across an "Ibn al-Khamar" which may or may not be a transliteration of the same name, certainly a different person, though...

Regarding the alif, I believe it should be "Ibn" not "bin" but the alif does look like it might be attached to the previous word... a spacing issue... this has been a real lesson in attentiveness to detail (which stands to reason as this is an encyclopedia) ! Tim Hawthorne (talk) 19:19, 13 August 2009 (UTC)


 * There is some information at Ibn (name). There it says that it can indeed bee spelled as ابن though I've personally only seen it spelled as بن (even though it is still transliterated as "ibn" in English-language reference works.) But I really do not know enough about Arabic to say much sensible about this. —Ruud 19:31, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

I'm not entirely sure either, I only have MSA 1, and having only seen a transliteration of Ibn al-Qamar... I will have a look through other sources and try to find another reference to Ibn al-Qamar which contains original Arabic. Interestingly, for Ibn Battuta, his Wikipedia entry has no Arabic translation! Perhaps we could help with that. Also on Wiki, Ibn Rushd's Arabic name follows the بن convention in the Arabic spelling, as does Ibn Khaldun. So I think we should change it. Tim Hawthorne (talk) 19:48, 13 August 2009 (UTC).