Arabic-L:LING:Standard Transliteration Systems

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Wed 01 May 2002
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject:Standard Transliteration Systems

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1)
Date:  01 May 2002
From:"sattar.izwaini at stud.umist.ac.uk"
<Sattar.Izwaini at student.umist.ac.uk>
Subject:Standard Transliteration Systems

Hi
There are roughly two standard systems of transliterating Arabic.
One is adopted by the Journal of Islamic Studies and the
Ecyclopaedia of Islam which is based on the traditional scholarly
method, where some Arabic-specific letters such as saad and
ghayn are transliterated by adding dots and lines under the close
Latin characters or by a combination of two characters such as gh
for gayn.

The other method is to transliterate Arabic-specific letters by
capitalizing them (as Arabic has no capitals), due to the
unavailability of dotted and underlined characters in some word
processing programs. So saad is S, ghayn is G, haa' is H. Even if
such dotted and underlined characters are available, this method is
much easier to grasp and words are easily read.
This is the academic kind of transliteration. A simple search on the
web can give a lot of links. Check for example:
http://visl.hum.sdu.dk/itwebsite/ar/artranslit.html

Last, is the one mentioned to be used on the web when writing
emails where Arabic words are to be included when writing in other
language (I cannot imagine a whole message transliterated that
way, let alone whole texts). This is a rather 'casual' kind of
rendering Arabic words where some letters are written as numbers
such as 3 for 'ayn, 6 for Taa' etc.

I hope this would help.

Sattar Izwaini
PhD Candidate
Department of Language and Linguistics
UMIST
PO Box 88
Manchester M60 1QD
England

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