Little Green Footballs Dictionary

This will be a combo-post, since I got several emails concerning the origin of the term “Balestinian.” I’ll just paste them all in here together, and they can be dealt with en masse:

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“I was looking at your cool dictionary.

As far as I know, “Balestinian” is used for Palestinian since most
“Palestinians” (or Arabic speakers in general) have difficulty
distinguishing between the “B” and “P” sounds. Listen to a guy like
Erekat being interviewed in English and you will hear it prett quickly.”

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“I’m just guessing, after having lived for sometime with arab people, that this term may have been invented because in the arab language there is no letter P. Instead the letter B is used to mimic this sound so a Pencil would become a Bencil, Parking Place would be Barking Blace and Palestinian == Balestinian. Maybe the word bale has nothing to do with it and it is just being used to mock the accent in which they pronounce their own name. Either way im sure eventually we can all get along, until then it would bea good idea to not kill too many people.”

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“Pretty sure it is becuase arabs can’t say proper P’s, and it comes out sounding like a B.

Love youre blog.”

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Your task (actually pretty simple): determine that this “P/B” thing in Arabic is true, then change the definiton of “Balestinian” to reflect this fact.