Arabic transliteration
Due to the fact that the
Arabic language has a number of
phonemes that have no equivalent in
English or other
European languages, a number of different
transliteration methods have been invented to represent certain
Arabic characters, due to various conflicting goals.
Any transliteration system of Arabic has to make a number of decisions, dependent on its intended field of application. The root of the problem is that the information contained in unvocalized Arabic writing is not sufficient to give a reader unfamiliar with the language sufficient information for accurate pronunciation. An exact equivalent of e.g. would be
, which is meaningless to an untrained reader. The "full transliteration" adds information not in the text, which has to be supplied by a speaker of Arabic,
. Usually, newspapers and popular books use not a transliteration, but a
transcription: instead of translating each written letter they try to reproduce the sound of the words according to the orthography rules of the target language, e.g.
Saddam Hussein; for spelling differences depending on the target language, compare
Omar Khayyam with German
Omar Chajjam, both for (unvocalized
, vocalized
).
Most issues around the
romanization are about transliterating vs. transcribing"others about, what should be romanized:
* transliteration ignores assimilation (
sandhi) of the article before "
solar letters":
al-shams not the transcribed
ash-shams /
aš-Šams /
asch-Schams (German) /
asj-Sjams (dutch) /
ach-chams (French)
* a transliteration must render the "tied tā" (
ta marbouta ة) faithfuly, a transcription must render the sound ("a" like any other "a" or "t" like any other "at" " or in a vocalized text nothing vs. t)
**
ISO 233 has a unique symbol, ,
ISO/R 233 uses superscript
h,
t.
* "broken alif" (
alif maqṣura, ى) must be transliterated with a special symbol, but is trancribed like standing alif, when it stands for a long a (
ā)
* For nunation is true what is true for the rest: transliteration renders what you see, transcription what you hear.
A transcription may reflect the languages as spoken by the people of Baghdad, or the official Standard as spoken by a preacher in the mosque or a TV news reader.A transcription is free to add phonological (such as vowels) or morphological (such as word boundaries) information. A transliteration is ideally fully reversible: a machine must be able to translate it into Arabic and back.
A transliteration may be criticized as flawed for any of the following reasons:
*A "loose" transliteration is ambiguous, rendering several Arabic phonemes with an identical transliteration, or digraphs for a single phoneme (such as
sh) may be confused with two adjacent phonemes;
*Symbols representing phonemes may be considered too similar (e.g., ` and ' or and for
ayin and
hamza);
*ASCII transliterations using capital letters to disambiguate phonemes are easy to type but may be considered unaesthetic.
*
Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (
1936): Adopted by the International Convention of Orientalist Scholars in Rome. It is the basis for the very influential
Hans Wehr dictionary (ISBN 0879500034). [
1]
*
ISO/R 233 (
1961). Replaced by
ISO 233 in
1984 but still encountered.
*
BS 4280 (
1968): Developed by the
British Standards Institute. [
2]
*
SATTS (
1970s): One-to-one mapping to Latin Morse equivalents; used by US military.
*
UNGEGN (
1972): [
3]
*
DIN-31635 (
1982): Developed by the
Deutsches Institut für Normung (German Institute for Standardization).
*
ISO 233 (
1984).
*
Qalam (
1985): A system that focuses upon preserving the spelling, rather than the pronunciation, and uses mixed case. [
4]
*
ISO 233-2(
1993). Simplified transliteration.
*
Buckwalter Transliteration (
1990s): Developed at
Xerox by
Tim Buckwalter [
5]; doesn't require unusual
diacritics. [
6]
*
ALA-LC (
1997). [
7]
* SAS: Spanish Arabists School (
José Antonio Conde and others, early
19th century onwards). [
8]
A table comparing romanizations using DIN 31635, ISO 233, ISO/R 233, UN, ALA-LC, and Encyclopaedia of Islam systems is available here: [
9].
Comparison table
