What's the right way to spell Ch/h/an/ann/u/k/kk/ah? And why did Peking become Beijing, anyway? Transliteration is not Transylvania. It's not even transitive - no need to be scared of it.

Probably more than half of the email I get for this column is a variation on the following:

"This business of dialog vs. dialogue and monolog vs. monologue has plagued me. . . .  I prefer the spellings without the 'ue.' Is there a rule?"

"Is there a rule?" is, of course, the question most asked of any grammarian or copy chief. Most of the time, the answer is a variation on "Yes, but . . ." or a discussion of commonly accepted usage. And often, the questions asked of grammarians relate to spelling, although spelling is a matter of style and usage and not, technically, grammar.

And as this holiday season bears down upon us, I have received questions about how to spell Hanukkah. I have consulted Hebrew-English dictionaries.

I have even discussed how to spell Hanukkah with my mother-in-law, no less, who says she spells it "Chanukah . . . As a traditionalist, I must use the only way it seems correct."

What, exactly, does that mean? Well, whenever English uses a word from a language that does not use the Roman alphabet (a, b, c, d, et cetera), it must find a way to express the sounds conveyed by such letters as an aleph, or pi, or pictographs such as ｵ or 昂 in Roman letters. And over the years, various people have come up with various ways of doing so. Usually, linguists develop one system that becomes commonly accepted and widely used, such as Pinyin, used for the Romanization of Chinese.

Sometimes these widely used systems change, which is what happened when Peking became Beijing. The name of the city didn't change - the way the sounds were spelled in English did. The right way is the way the Chinese want it to be spelled, Beijing. In fact, the Chinese government adopted the Pinyin transliteration standard in 1949; it is just that the West mostly ignored their preference until the 1980s. Not anymore.

So, considering that December holiday. Some people find the throat-clearing sound expressed by the Hebrew letter chet to be best expressed in English as "ch"; others prefer "h" since the "ch" in English most often signifies the sound that begins the word "chair." There is no one authority strong enough to insist on one spelling or the other; it's become a matter of familiarity, preference, and tradition.

So my mother-in-law is right after all. (It's always good to say that.) As a traditionalist, she can spell it traditionally. Whatever her tradition may be.

Happy holidays!