Jovial (5 Feb 2009)
"The Hebrew Spelling of Barack Obama"

In re the confusion over "אובמה" vs "אובאמה", Obama's staff itself uses the spelling "אובמה", as does every Israeli press reference I've personally encountered beforehand.  Here's a few links to support that....
John mentioned yesterday that there was a Hebrew blog started by an Obama supporter, not by Obama himself, claiming to be "official" at http://www.tapuz.co.il/blog/userBlog.asp?FolderName=Obama , but according to http://marcambinder.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/04/obama_launches_hebrewlanguage.php , it's not official, like it claims to be.  However, at least one news agency thought it was (http://www.ynet.co.il/english/articles/0,7340,L-3530458,00.html).  That blog uses the "אובאמה" spelling which might cause some Hebrew speaking circles to think that he personally spells it that way and use that spelling. So the "אובאמה" spelling  could get used just on the belief that it is how he has chosen to spell his name.
 
I put BOTH spellings into Google and got these results:
 
Some of the "ברק אובאמה " sites actually have "ברק אובמה " in their content, which might be a case of Google 'correcting' what you ask for with what it could assess you meant.  But some of the sites do use the second spelling.  Ignoring that , let's compare this numerically.  The "ברק אובמה " spelling is preferred by a factor of 6.6 to 1.  How many of the web sites using "ברק אובאמה " used it because they tought it was the "official" spelling due to http://www.tapuz.co.il/blog/userBlog.asp?FolderName=Obama  calling itself "official" when it is not?  Who knows?  But I suspect the landslide favorable use of "ברק אובמה "  in 87% of all web pages over "ברק אובאמה ".
 
There's several ways "Obama" could be spelled, such as using AYIN instead of ALEF or dropping the VAV, but this hardly returns any Google results so I suspect that the Arabic spelling probably uses the Arabic equivalent of an ALEF since that seems to be firmly preferred over the AYIN.
 
 
Overall, here's the impact to gematric results....
My philosophy would be this.  Assume that "אובמה" is the corect spelling, but don't discount the fact that you may need to add "1" or a missing ALEF in any analysis you do on this issue involving his name in Hebrew.  ANY spelling a person CHOOSES to use can be considered right, even if it's a bad transliteration of how it is spelled in English.
 
 
יוסף Joe
www.messiahalive.com/torah.htm
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Thanks, Joe! That is very helpful.
John