You Say Quran, I Say Koran...

I'm not going to make a judgment on the whole situation in this post, but I do find an aspect of the Newsweek/Koran flap interesting. The AP now spells it Quran which is much harder to pronounce if you're only looking at that. The spelling "koran", which I favor in English, is favored by the New York Times, the BBC and USA Today among others. I wonder what caused the AP to advocate the change in their style guide.

This reminds me a bit of the Moselm/Muslim shift that happened while I was in school. In grade school, the spelling in textbooks was Moslem. Once I reached high school, the spelling somehow became Muslim almost universally. No explanation. We were just expected to make the change.

Next time, I hope to be famous enough to get the memo on the next arabic word shift.