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Romanization of Arabic

The romanization of Arabic is the systematic rendering of written and spoken Arabic in the Latin script. Romanized Arabic is used for various purposes, among them transcription of names and titles, cataloging Arabic language works, language education when used instead of or alongside the Arabic script, and representation of the language in scientific publications by linguists. These formal systems, which often make use of diacritics and non-standard Latin characters and are used in academic settings or for the benefit of non-speakers, contrast with informal means of written communication used by speakers such as the Latin-based Arabic chat alphabet.

Google Ngrams chart showing the changing English romanization of the Arabic short vowels (ـَ, ـِ and ـُ) between the 19th and 20th centuries, using مُسْلِم (Muslim) and مُحَمَّد (Muhammad) as examples.

Different systems and strategies have been developed to address the inherent problems of rendering various Arabic varieties in the Latin script. Examples of such problems are the symbols for Arabic phonemes that do not exist in English or other European languages; the means of representing the Arabic definite article, which is always spelled the same way in written Arabic but has numerous pronunciations in the spoken language depending on context; and the representation of short vowels (usually i u or e o, accounting for variations such as Muslim/Moslem or Mohammed/Muhammad/Mohamed).

Method

Romanization is often termed "transliteration", but this is not technically correct.[citation needed] Transliteration is the direct representation of foreign letters using Latin symbols, while most systems for romanizing Arabic are actually transcription systems, which represent the sound of the language, since short vowels and geminate consonants, for example, does not usually appear in Arabic writing. As an example, the above rendering munāẓaratu l-ḥurūfi l-ʻarabīyah of the Arabic: مناظرة الحروف العربية is a transcription, indicating the pronunciation; an example transliteration would be mnaẓrḧ alḥrwf alʻrbyḧ.

Romanization standards and systems

Principal standards and systems are:

Early Romanization

Early Romanization of the Arabic language was standardized in the various bilingual Arabic-European dictionaries of the 17–19th centuries:

  • Pedro de Alcalá, Vocabulista, 1505. A Spanish-Arabic glossary in transcription only.[1]
  • Valentin Schindler, Lexicon Pentaglotton: Hebraicum, Chaldicum, Syriacum, Talmudico-Rabbinicum, et Arabicum, 1612. Arabic lemmas were printed in Hebrew characters.[1]
  • Franciscus Raphelengius, Lexicon Arabicum, Leiden 1613. The first printed dictionary of the Arabic language in Arabic characters.[1]
  • Jacobus Golius, Lexicon Arabico-Latinum, Leiden 1653. The dominant Arabic dictionary in Europe for almost two centuries.[1]
  • Georg Freytag, Lexicon Arabico-Latinum, praesertim ex Djeuharii Firuzubadiique et aliorum libris confectum I–IV, Halle 1830–1837[1]
  • Edward William Lane, Arabic–English Lexicon, 8 vols, London-Edinburgh 1863–1893. Highly influential, but incomplete (stops at Kaf)[1]

Mixed digraphic and diacritical

  • BGN/PCGN romanization (1956).[2]
  • UNGEGN (1972). United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names, or "Variant A of the Amended Beirut System". Adopted from BGN/PCGN.[3][4]
    • IGN System 1973 or "Variant B of the Amended Beirut System", that conforms to the French orthography and is preferred to the Variant A in French-speaking countries as in Maghreb and Lebanon.[3][5]
    • ADEGN romanization (2007) is different from UNGEGN in two ways: (1) ظ is d͟h instead of z̧; (2) the cedilla is replaced by a sub-macron (_) in all the characters with the cedilla.[3]
  • ALA-LC (first published 1991), from the American Library Association and the Library of Congress.[6] This romanization is close to the romanization of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft and Hans Wehr, which is used internationally in scientific publications by Arabists.
    • IJMES, used by International Journal of Middle East Studies, very similar to ALA-LC.[7]
    • EI, Encyclopaedia of Islam (1st ed., 1913–1938; 2nd ed., 1960–2005).[8]

Fully diacritical

ASCII-based

Comparison table

Letter Unicode Name IPA BGN/
PCGN
UNGEGN ALA-LC EI Wehr 1 EALL BS DIN ISO ArabTeX Arabizi 2[16][17][18]
ء3 0621 hamzah ʔ ʼ 4 ʾ ʼ 4 ʾ ʼ 4 ʾ ˈˌ ' 2
ا 0627 alif ā ʾ A a/e/é
ب 0628 ʼ b b
ت 062A ʼ t t
ث 062B thāʼ θ th (t͟h)5 _t s/th/t
ج12 062C jīm d͡ʒ~ɡ~ʒ j dj (d͟j)5 j 6 ǧ ^g j/g/dj
ح 062D ḥāʼ ħ  7 .h 7/h
خ 062E khāʼ x kh (k͟h)5  6 x _h kh/7'/5
د 062F dāl d d
ذ 0630 dhāl ð dh (d͟h)5 _d z/dh/th/d
ر 0631 ʼ r r
ز 0632 zayn/zāy z z
س 0633 sīn s s
ش 0634 shīn ʃ sh (s͟h)5 š ^s sh/ch/$
ص 0635 ṣād ş 7 .s s/9
ض 0636 ḍād  7 .d d/9'/D
ط 0637 ṭāʼ ţ 7 .t t/6/T
ظ 0638 ẓāʼ ðˤ~  7 ḏ̣/ẓ11 .z z/dh/6'/th
ع 0639 ʻayn ʕ ʻ 4 ʿ ʽ 4 ʿ ` 3
غ 063A ghayn ɣ gh (g͟h)5  6 ġ ġ .g gh/3'/8
ف8 0641 ʼ f f
ق8 0642 qāf q q 2/g/q/8/9
ك 0643 kāf k k
ل 0644 lām l l
م 0645 mīm m m
ن 0646 nūn n n
ه 0647 ʼ h h
و 0648 wāw w, w; ū w; U w/ou/oo/u/o
ي9 064A ʼ j, y; ī y; I y/i/ee/ei/ai
آ 0622 alif maddah ʔaː ā, ʼā ʾā ʾâ 'A 2a/aa
ة 0629 ʼ marbūṭah h, t h; t —; t h; t T a/e(h); et/at
ال 06270644 alif lām (var.) al- 10 ʾal al- el/al
ى9 0649 alif maqṣūrah á ā _A a
Vocalization
ـَ 064E fatḥah a a a/e/é
ـِ 0650 kasrah i i i/e/é
ـُ13 064F ḍammah u u ou/o/u
ـَا 064E0627 fatḥah alif ā a’ A/aa a
ـِي 0650064A kasrah yāʼ ī iy I/iy i/ee
ـُو13 064F0648 ḍammah wāw ū uw U/uw ou/oo/u
ـَي 064E064A fatḥah yāʼ aj ay ay/ai/ey/ei
ـَو 064E0648 fatḥah wāw aw aw aw/aou
ـً14 064B fatḥatān an an an á aN an
ـٍ14 064D kasratān in in in í iN in/en
ـٌ14 064C ḍammatān un un un ú uN oun/on/oon/un
  • ^1 Hans Wehr transliteration does not capitalize the first letter at the beginning of sentences nor in proper names.
  • ^2 The chat table is only a demonstration and is based on the spoken varieties which vary considerably from Literary Arabic on which the IPA table and the rest of the transliterations are based.
  • ^3 Review hamzah for its various forms.
  • ^4 Neither standard defines which code point to use for hamzah and ʻayn. Appropriate Unicode points would be modifier letter apostropheʼ⟩ and modifier letter turned commaʻ⟩ (for the UNGEGN and BGN/PCGN) or modifier letter reversed commaʽ⟩ (for the Wehr and Survey of Egypt System (SES)), all of which Unicode defines as letters. Often right and left single quotation marks⟩, ⟨⟩ are used instead, but Unicode defines those as punctuation marks, and they can cause compatibility issues. The glottal stop (hamzah) in these romanizations isn't written word-initially.
  • ^5 In Encyclopaedia of Islam digraphs are underlined, that is t͟h, d͟j, k͟h, d͟h, s͟h, g͟h. In BGN/PCGN on the contrary the sequences ـتـهـ, ـكـهـ, ـدهـ, ـسهـ may be romanized with middle dot as t·h, k·h, d·h, s·h respectively.
  • ^6 In the original German edition of his dictionary (1952) Wehr used ǧ, ḫ, ġ for j, ḵ, ḡ respectively (that is all the letters used are equal to DMG/DIN 31635). The variant presented in the table is from the English translation of the dictionary (1961).
  • ^7 BGN/PCGN allows use of underdots instead of cedilla.
  • ^8 Fāʼ and qāf are traditionally written in Northwestern Africa as ڢ and ڧـ ـڧـ ـٯ, respectively, while the latter's dot is only added initially or medially.
  • ^9 In Egypt, Sudan, and sometimes in other regions, the standard form for final-yāʼ is only ى (without dots) in handwriting and print, for both final /-iː/ and final /-aː/. ى for the latter pronunciation, is called ألف لينة alif layyinah [ˈʔælef læjˈjenæ], 'flexible alif'.
  • ^10 The sun and moon letters and hamzat waṣl pronunciation rules apply, although it is acceptable to ignore them. The UN system and ALA-LC prefer lowercase a and hyphens: al-Baṣrah, ar-Riyāḍ; BGN/PCGN prefers uppercase A and no hyphens: Al Baṣrah, Ar Riyāḍ.[3]
  • ^11 The EALL suggests ẓ "in proper names" (volume 4, page 517).
  • ^12 BGN/PCGN, UNGEGN, ALA-LC, and DIN 31635 use a normal ⟨g⟩ for ج when romanizing Egyptian names or toponyms that are expectedly pronounced with /ɡ/.
  • ^13 BGN/PCGN, UNGEGN, ALA-LC, and DIN 31635 use the French-based ⟨ou⟩ for /u(:)/ in Francophone Arabic speaking countries in names and toponyms.
  • ^14 Nunation is ignored in all romanizations in names and toponyms.

Romanization issues

Any romanization system has to make a number of decisions which are dependent on its intended field of application.

Vowels

One basic problem is that written Arabic is normally unvocalized; i.e., many of the vowels are not written out, and must be supplied by a reader familiar with the language. Hence unvocalized Arabic writing does not give a reader unfamiliar with the language sufficient information for accurate pronunciation. As a result, a pure transliteration, e.g., rendering قطر as qṭr, is meaningless to an untrained reader. For this reason, transcriptions are generally used that add vowels, e.g. qaṭar. However, unvocalized systems match exactly to written Arabic, unlike vocalized systems such as Arabic chat, which some claim detracts from one's ability to spell.[19]

Transliteration vs. transcription

Most uses of romanization call for transcription rather than transliteration: Instead of transliterating each written letter, they try to reproduce the sound of the words according to the orthography rules of the target language: Qaṭar. This applies equally to scientific and popular applications. A pure transliteration would need to omit vowels (e.g. qṭr), making the result difficult to interpret except for a subset of trained readers fluent in Arabic. Even if vowels are added, a transliteration system would still need to distinguish between multiple ways of spelling the same sound in the Arabic script, e.g. alif ا vs. alif maqṣūrah ى for the sound /aː/ ā, and the six different ways (ء إ أ آ ؤ ئ) of writing the glottal stop (hamza, usually transcribed ʼ ). This sort of detail is needlessly confusing, except in a very few situations (e.g., typesetting text in the Arabic script).

Most issues related to the romanization of Arabic are about transliterating vs. transcribing; others, about what should be romanized:

  • Some transliterations ignore assimilation of the definite article al- before the "sun letters", and may be easily misread by non-Arabic speakers. For instance, "the light" النور an-nūr would be more literally transliterated along the lines of alnūr. In the transcription an-nūr, a hyphen is added and the unpronounced /l/ removed for the convenience of the uninformed non-Arabic speaker, who would otherwise pronounce an /l/, perhaps not understanding that /n/ in nūr is geminated. Alternatively, if the shaddah is not transliterated (since it is strictly not a letter), a strictly literal transliteration would be alnūr, which presents similar problems for the uninformed non-Arabic speaker.
  • A transliteration should render the "closed tāʼ" (tāʼ marbūṭah, ة) faithfully. Many transcriptions render the sound /a/ as a or ah and t when it denotes /at/.
  • "Restricted alif" (alif maqṣūrah, ى) should be transliterated with an acute accent, á, differentiating it from regular alif ا, but it is transcribed in many schemes like alif, ā, because it stands for /aː/.
  • Nunation: what is true elsewhere is also true for nunation: transliteration renders what is seen, transcription what is heard, when in the Arabic script, it is written with diacritics, not by letters, or omitted.

A transcription may reflect the language as spoken, typically rendering names, for example, by the people of Baghdad (Baghdad Arabic), or the official standard (Literary Arabic) as spoken by a preacher in the mosque or a TV newsreader. A transcription is free to add phonological (such as vowels) or morphological (such as word boundaries) information. Transcriptions will also vary depending on the writing conventions of the target language; compare English Omar Khayyam with German Omar Chajjam, both for عمر خيام /ʕumar xajjaːm/, [ˈʕomɑr xæjˈjæːm] (unvocalized ʿmr ḫyām, vocalized ʻUmar Khayyām).

A transliteration is ideally fully reversible: a machine should be able to transliterate it back into Arabic. A transliteration can be considered as flawed for any one of the following reasons:

  • A "loose" transliteration is ambiguous, rendering several Arabic phonemes with an identical transliteration, or such that digraphs for a single phoneme (such as dh gh kh sh th rather than ḏ ġ ḫ š ṯ) may be confused with two adjacent consonants—but this problem is resolved in the ALA-LC romanization system, where the prime symbol ʹ is used to separate two consonants when they do not form a digraph;[20] for example: أَكْرَمَتْها akramatʹhā ('she honored her'), in which the t and h are two distinct consonantal sounds.
  • Symbols representing phonemes may be considered too similar (e.g., ʻ and ' or ʿ and ʾ for ع ʻayn and hamzah);
  • ASCII transliterations using capital letters to disambiguate phonemes are easy to type, but may be considered unaesthetic.

A fully accurate transcription may not be necessary for native Arabic speakers, as they would be able to pronounce names and sentences correctly anyway, but it can be very useful for those not fully familiar with spoken Arabic and who are familiar with the Roman alphabet. An accurate transliteration serves as a valuable stepping stone for learning, pronouncing correctly, and distinguishing phonemes. It is a useful tool for anyone who is familiar with the sounds of Arabic but not fully conversant in the language.

One criticism is that a fully accurate system would require special learning that most do not have to actually pronounce names correctly, and that with a lack of a universal romanization system they will not be pronounced correctly by non-native speakers anyway. The precision will be lost if special characters are not replicated and if a reader is not familiar with Arabic pronunciation.

Examples

Examples in Literary Arabic:

Arabic أمجد كان له قصر إلى المملكة المغربية
Arabic with diacritics
(normally omitted)
أَمْجَدُ كَانَ لَهُ قَصْر إِلَى الْمَمْلَكَةِ الْمَغْرِبِيَّة
IPA /ʔamdʒadu kaːna lahuː qasˤr/ /ʔila‿l.mamlakati‿l.maɣribij.jah/
ALA-LC Amjad kāna lahu qaṣr Ilá al-mamlakah al-Maghribīyah
Hans Wehr amjad kāna lahū qaṣr ilā l-mamlaka al-maḡribīya
DIN 31635 ʾAmǧad kāna lahu qaṣr ʾIlā l-mamlakah al-Maġribiyyah
UNGEGN Amjad kāna lahu qaşr Ilá al-mamlakah al-maghribiyyah
ISO 233 ʾˈamǧad kāna lahu qaṣr ʾˈilaỳ ʾˈalmamlakaẗ ʾˈalmaġribiȳaẗ
ArabTeX am^gad kAna lahu qa.sr il_A almamlakaT alma.gribiyyaT
English Amjad had a palace To the Moroccan Kingdom

Arabic alphabet and nationalism

There have been many instances of national movements to convert Arabic script into Latin script or to romanize the language.

Lebanon

 
LEBNAAN in proposed Said Akl alphabet (issue #686)

A Beirut newspaper, La Syrie, pushed for the change from Arabic script to Latin script in 1922. The major head of this movement was Louis Massignon, a French Orientalist, who brought his concern before the Arabic Language Academy in Damascus in 1928. Massignon's attempt at romanization failed as the Academy and the population viewed the proposal as an attempt from the Western world to take over their country. Sa'id Afghani, a member of the Academy, asserted that the movement to romanize the script was a Zionist plan to dominate Lebanon.[21][22]

Egypt

After the period of colonialism in Egypt, Egyptians were looking for a way to reclaim and reemphasize Egyptian culture. As a result, some Egyptians pushed for an Egyptianization of the Arabic language in which the formal Arabic and the colloquial Arabic would be combined into one language and the Latin alphabet would be used.[21][22] There was also the idea of finding a way to use hieroglyphics instead of the Latin alphabet.[21][22] A scholar, Salama Musa, agreed with the idea of applying a Latin alphabet to Egyptian Arabic, as he believed that would allow Egypt to have a closer relationship with the West. He also believed that Latin script was key to the success of Egypt as it would allow for more advances in science and technology. This change in script, he believed, would solve the problems inherent with Arabic, such as a lack of written vowels and difficulties writing foreign words.[21][22][23] Ahmad Lutfi As Sayid and Muhammad Azmi, two Egyptian intellectuals, agreed with Musa and supported the push for romanization.[21][22] The idea that romanization was necessary for modernization and growth in Egypt continued with Abd Al Aziz Fahmi in 1944. He was the chairman for the Writing and Grammar Committee for the Arabic Language Academy of Cairo.[21][22] He believed and desired to implement romanization in a way that allowed words and spellings to remain somewhat familiar to the Egyptian people. However, this effort failed as the Egyptian people felt a strong cultural tie to the Arabic alphabet, particularly the older generation.[21][22]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f Edward Lipiński, 2012, Arabic Linguistics: A Historiographic Overview, pages 32–33
  2. ^ "Romanization system for Arabic. BGN/PCGN 1956 System" (PDF).
  3. ^ a b c d "Arabic" (PDF). UNGEGN.
  4. ^ Technical reference manual for the standardization of geographical names (PDF). UNGEGN. 2007. p. 12 [22].
  5. ^ "Systèmes français de romanisation" (PDF). UNGEGN. 2009.
  6. ^ "Arabic romanization table" (PDF). The Library of Congress.
  7. ^ "IJMES Translation & Transliteration Guide". International Journal of Middle East Studies.
  8. ^ "Encyclopaedia of Islam Romanization vs ALA Romanization for Arabic". University of Washington Libraries.
  9. ^ Brockelmann, Carl; Ronkel, Philippus Samuel van (1935). Die Transliteration der arabischen Schrift... (PDF). Leipzig.
  10. ^ a b Reichmuth, Philipp (2009). "Transcription". In Versteegh, Kees (ed.). Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics. Vol. 4. Brill. pp. 515–20.
  11. ^ Millar, M. Angélica; Salgado, Rosa; Zedán, Marcela (2005). Gramatica de la lengua arabe para hispanohablantes. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universitaria. pp. 53–54. ISBN 978-956-11-1799-0.
  12. ^ . BSI Group. Archived from the original on 7 October 2008. Retrieved 18 May 2014.
  13. ^ ArabTex User Manual Section 4.1 : ASCII Transliteration Encoding.
  14. ^ "Buckwalter Arabic Transliteration". QAMUS LLC.
  15. ^ "Arabic Morphological Analyzer/The Buckwalter Transliteration". Xerox. Retrieved 30 April 2017.
  16. ^ Sullivan, Natalie (July 2017). Writing Arabizi: Orthographic Variation in Romanized Lebanese Arabic on Twitter (Plan II Honors Thesis). doi:10.15781/T2W951823. hdl:2152/72420.
  17. ^ Bjørnsson, Jan Arild (November 2010). "Egyptian Romanized Arabic: A Study of Selected Features from Communication Among Egyptian Youth on Facebook" (PDF). University of Oslo. Retrieved 31 March 2019.
  18. ^ Abu Elhija, Dua'a (3 July 2014). "A new writing system? Developing orthographies for writing Arabic dialects in electronic media". Writing Systems Research. 6 (2): 190–214. doi:10.1080/17586801.2013.868334. ISSN 1758-6801. S2CID 219568845.
  19. ^ "Arabizi sparks concern among educators". GulfNews.com. 9 May 2013. Retrieved 18 May 2014.
  20. ^ "Arabic" (PDF). ALA-LC Romanization Tables. Library of Congress. p. 9. Retrieved 14 June 2013. 21. The prime (ʹ) is used: (a) To separate two letters representing two distinct consonantal sounds, when the combination might otherwise be read as a digraph.
  21. ^ a b c d e f g Shrivtiel, Shraybom (1998). The Question of Romanisation of the Script and The Emergence of Nationalism in the Middle East. Mediterranean Language Review. pp. 179–196.
  22. ^ a b c d e f g History of Arabic Writing
  23. ^ Shrivtiel, p. 188

External links

  • Comparative table of DIN 31635, ISO 233, ISO/R 233, UN, ALA-LC, and Encyclopædia of Islam (PDF; not normative)

romanization, arabic, romanization, arabic, systematic, rendering, written, spoken, arabic, latin, script, romanized, arabic, used, various, purposes, among, them, transcription, names, titles, cataloging, arabic, language, works, language, education, when, us. The romanization of Arabic is the systematic rendering of written and spoken Arabic in the Latin script Romanized Arabic is used for various purposes among them transcription of names and titles cataloging Arabic language works language education when used instead of or alongside the Arabic script and representation of the language in scientific publications by linguists These formal systems which often make use of diacritics and non standard Latin characters and are used in academic settings or for the benefit of non speakers contrast with informal means of written communication used by speakers such as the Latin based Arabic chat alphabet Google Ngrams chart showing the changing English romanization of the Arabic short vowels ـ ـ and ـ between the 19th and 20th centuries using م س ل م Muslim and م ح م د Muhammad as examples Different systems and strategies have been developed to address the inherent problems of rendering various Arabic varieties in the Latin script Examples of such problems are the symbols for Arabic phonemes that do not exist in English or other European languages the means of representing the Arabic definite article which is always spelled the same way in written Arabic but has numerous pronunciations in the spoken language depending on context and the representation of short vowels usually i u or e o accounting for variations such as Muslim Moslem or Mohammed Muhammad Mohamed Contents 1 Method 2 Romanization standards and systems 2 1 Early Romanization 2 2 Mixed digraphic and diacritical 2 3 Fully diacritical 2 4 ASCII based 2 5 Comparison table 3 Romanization issues 3 1 Vowels 3 2 Transliteration vs transcription 4 Examples 5 Arabic alphabet and nationalism 5 1 Lebanon 5 2 Egypt 6 See also 7 References 8 External linksMethod EditRomanization is often termed transliteration but this is not technically correct citation needed Transliteration is the direct representation of foreign letters using Latin symbols while most systems for romanizing Arabic are actually transcription systems which represent the sound of the language since short vowels and geminate consonants for example does not usually appear in Arabic writing As an example the above rendering munaẓaratu l ḥurufi l ʻarabiyah of the Arabic مناظرة الحروف العربية is a transcription indicating the pronunciation an example transliteration would be mnaẓrḧ alḥrwf alʻrbyḧ Romanization standards and systems EditPrincipal standards and systems are Early Romanization Edit Early Romanization of the Arabic language was standardized in the various bilingual Arabic European dictionaries of the 17 19th centuries Pedro de Alcala Vocabulista 1505 A Spanish Arabic glossary in transcription only 1 Valentin Schindler Lexicon Pentaglotton Hebraicum Chaldicum Syriacum Talmudico Rabbinicum et Arabicum 1612 Arabic lemmas were printed in Hebrew characters 1 Franciscus Raphelengius Lexicon Arabicum Leiden 1613 The first printed dictionary of the Arabic language in Arabic characters 1 Jacobus Golius Lexicon Arabico Latinum Leiden 1653 The dominant Arabic dictionary in Europe for almost two centuries 1 Georg Freytag Lexicon Arabico Latinum praesertim ex Djeuharii Firuzubadiique et aliorum libris confectum I IV Halle 1830 1837 1 Edward William Lane Arabic English Lexicon 8 vols London Edinburgh 1863 1893 Highly influential but incomplete stops at Kaf 1 Mixed digraphic and diacritical Edit Further information Digraph orthography and Diacritic BGN PCGN romanization 1956 2 UNGEGN 1972 United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names or Variant A of the Amended Beirut System Adopted from BGN PCGN 3 4 IGN System 1973 or Variant B of the Amended Beirut System that conforms to the French orthography and is preferred to the Variant A in French speaking countries as in Maghreb and Lebanon 3 5 ADEGN romanization 2007 is different from UNGEGN in two ways 1 ظ is d h instead of z 2 the cedilla is replaced by a sub macron in all the characters with the cedilla 3 ALA LC first published 1991 from the American Library Association and the Library of Congress 6 This romanization is close to the romanization of the Deutsche Morgenlandische Gesellschaft and Hans Wehr which is used internationally in scientific publications by Arabists IJMES used by International Journal of Middle East Studies very similar to ALA LC 7 EI Encyclopaedia of Islam 1st ed 1913 1938 2nd ed 1960 2005 8 Fully diacritical Edit DMG Deutsche Morgenlandische Gesellschaft 1935 adopted by the International Convention of Orientalist Scholars in Rome 9 DIN 31635 1982 developed by the German Institute for Standardization Deutsches Institut fur Normung Hans Wehr transliteration 1961 1994 a modification to DIN 31635 EALL Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics edited by Kees Versteegh Brill 2006 2009 10 Spanish romanization identical to DMG DIN with the exception of three letters ǧ gt ŷ ḫ gt j ġ gt g 11 ISO 233 1984 letter to letter vowels are transliterated only if they are shown with diacritics otherwise they are omitted ISO 233 2 1993 simplified transliteration vowels are always shown verification needed BS 4280 1968 developed by the British Standards Institution 12 ASCII based Edit ArabTeX since 1992 has been modelled closely after the transliteration standards ISO R 233 and DIN 31635 13 Buckwalter Transliteration 1990s developed at ALPNET by Tim Buckwalter does not require diacritics 14 15 Arabic chat alphabet 10 an ad hoc solution for conveniently entering Arabic using a Latin keyboard Comparison table Edit Letter Unicode Name IPA BGN PCGN UNGEGN ALA LC EI Wehr 1 EALL BS DIN ISO ArabTeX Arabizi 2 16 17 18 ء 3 0621 hamzah ʔ ʼ 4 ʾ ʼ 4 ʾ ʼ 4 ʾ ˈ ˌ 2ا 0627 alif aː a ʾ A a e eب 0628 baʼ b bت 062A taʼ t tث 062B thaʼ 8 th t h 5 ṯ t s th tج 12 062C jim d ʒ ɡ ʒ j dj d j 5 j 6 ǧ g j g djح 062D ḥaʼ ħ ḩ 7 ḥ h 7 hخ 062E khaʼ x kh k h 5 ḵ 6 x ẖ ḫ ẖ h kh 7 5د 062F dal d dذ 0630 dhal d dh d h 5 ḏ d z dh th dر 0631 raʼ r rز 0632 zayn zay z zس 0633 sin s sش 0634 shin ʃ sh s h 5 s s sh ch ص 0635 ṣad sˤ s 7 ṣ s s 9ض 0636 ḍad dˤ ḑ 7 ḍ d d 9 Dط 0637 ṭaʼ tˤ ţ 7 ṭ t t 6 Tظ 0638 ẓaʼ dˤ zˤ z 7 ẓ ḏ ẓ11 ẓ z z dh 6 thع 0639 ʻayn ʕ ʻ 4 ʿ ʽ 4 ʿ 3غ 063A ghayn ɣ gh g h 5 ḡ 6 ġ ḡ ġ g gh 3 8ف 8 0641 faʼ f fق 8 0642 qaf q q 2 g q 8 9ك 0643 kaf k kل 0644 lam l lم 0645 mim m mن 0646 nun n nه 0647 haʼ h hو 0648 waw w uː w u w U w ou oo u oي 9 064A yaʼ j iː y i y I y i ee ei aiآ 0622 alif maddah ʔaː a ʼ a ʾ a ʾ a A 2a aaة 0629 taʼ marbuṭah h t h t t h t ẗ T a e h et atال 06270644 alif lam var al 10 ʾ al al el alى 9 0649 alif maqṣurah aː a a ỳ A aVocalizationـ 064E fatḥah a a a e eـ 0650 kasrah i i i e eـ 13 064F ḍammah u u ou o uـ ا 064E0627 fatḥah alif aː a a A aa aـ ي 0650064A kasrah yaʼ iː i iy I iy i eeـ و 13 064F0648 ḍammah waw uː u uw U uw ou oo uـ ي 064E064A fatḥah yaʼ aj ay ay ai ey eiـ و 064E0648 fatḥah waw aw aw aw aouـ 14 064B fatḥatan an an an a aN anـ 14 064D kasratan in in in i iN in enـ 14 064C ḍammatan un un un u uN oun on oon un 1 Hans Wehr transliteration does not capitalize the first letter at the beginning of sentences nor in proper names 2 The chat table is only a demonstration and is based on the spoken varieties which vary considerably from Literary Arabic on which the IPA table and the rest of the transliterations are based 3 Review hamzah for its various forms 4 Neither standard defines which code point to use for hamzah and ʻayn Appropriate Unicode points would be modifier letter apostrophe ʼ and modifier letter turned comma ʻ for the UNGEGN and BGN PCGN or modifier letter reversed comma ʽ for the Wehr and Survey of Egypt System SES all of which Unicode defines as letters Often right and left single quotation marks are used instead but Unicode defines those as punctuation marks and they can cause compatibility issues The glottal stop hamzah in these romanizations isn t written word initially 5 In Encyclopaedia of Islam digraphs are underlined that is t h d j k h d h s h g h In BGN PCGN on the contrary the sequences ـتـهـ ـكـهـ ـدهـ ـسهـ may be romanized with middle dot as t h k h d h s h respectively 6 In the original German edition of his dictionary 1952 Wehr used ǧ ḫ ġ for j ḵ ḡ respectively that is all the letters used are equal to DMG DIN 31635 The variant presented in the table is from the English translation of the dictionary 1961 7 BGN PCGN allows use of underdots instead of cedilla 8 Faʼ and qaf are traditionally written in Northwestern Africa as ڢ and ڧـ ـڧـ ـٯ respectively while the latter s dot is only added initially or medially 9 In Egypt Sudan and sometimes in other regions the standard form for final yaʼ is only ى without dots in handwriting and print for both final iː and final aː ى for the latter pronunciation is called ألف لينة alif layyinah ˈʔaelef laejˈjenae flexible alif 10 The sun and moon letters and hamzat waṣl pronunciation rules apply although it is acceptable to ignore them The UN system and ALA LC prefer lowercase a and hyphens al Baṣrah ar Riyaḍ BGN PCGN prefers uppercase A and no hyphens Al Baṣrah Ar Riyaḍ 3 11 The EALL suggests ẓ in proper names volume 4 page 517 12 BGN PCGN UNGEGN ALA LC and DIN 31635 use a normal g for ج when romanizing Egyptian names or toponyms that are expectedly pronounced with ɡ 13 BGN PCGN UNGEGN ALA LC and DIN 31635 use the French based ou for u in Francophone Arabic speaking countries in names and toponyms 14 Nunation is ignored in all romanizations in names and toponyms Romanization issues EditAny romanization system has to make a number of decisions which are dependent on its intended field of application Vowels Edit One basic problem is that written Arabic is normally unvocalized i e many of the vowels are not written out and must be supplied by a reader familiar with the language Hence unvocalized Arabic writing does not give a reader unfamiliar with the language sufficient information for accurate pronunciation As a result a pure transliteration e g rendering قطر as qṭr is meaningless to an untrained reader For this reason transcriptions are generally used that add vowels e g qaṭar However unvocalized systems match exactly to written Arabic unlike vocalized systems such as Arabic chat which some claim detracts from one s ability to spell 19 Transliteration vs transcription Edit Most uses of romanization call for transcription rather than transliteration Instead of transliterating each written letter they try to reproduce the sound of the words according to the orthography rules of the target language Qaṭar This applies equally to scientific and popular applications A pure transliteration would need to omit vowels e g qṭr making the result difficult to interpret except for a subset of trained readers fluent in Arabic Even if vowels are added a transliteration system would still need to distinguish between multiple ways of spelling the same sound in the Arabic script e g alif ا vs alif maqṣurah ى for the sound aː a and the six different ways ء إ أ آ ؤ ئ of writing the glottal stop hamza usually transcribed ʼ This sort of detail is needlessly confusing except in a very few situations e g typesetting text in the Arabic script Most issues related to the romanization of Arabic are about transliterating vs transcribing others about what should be romanized Some transliterations ignore assimilation of the definite article al before the sun letters and may be easily misread by non Arabic speakers For instance the light النور an nur would be more literally transliterated along the lines of alnur In the transcription an nur a hyphen is added and the unpronounced l removed for the convenience of the uninformed non Arabic speaker who would otherwise pronounce an l perhaps not understanding that n in nur is geminated Alternatively if the shaddah is not transliterated since it is strictly not a letter a strictly literal transliteration would be alnur which presents similar problems for the uninformed non Arabic speaker A transliteration should render the closed taʼ taʼ marbuṭah ة faithfully Many transcriptions render the sound a as a or ah and t when it denotes at ISO 233 has a unique symbol ẗ Restricted alif alif maqṣurah ى should be transliterated with an acute accent a differentiating it from regular alif ا but it is transcribed in many schemes like alif a because it stands for aː Nunation what is true elsewhere is also true for nunation transliteration renders what is seen transcription what is heard when in the Arabic script it is written with diacritics not by letters or omitted A transcription may reflect the language as spoken typically rendering names for example by the people of Baghdad Baghdad Arabic or the official standard Literary Arabic as spoken by a preacher in the mosque or a TV newsreader A transcription is free to add phonological such as vowels or morphological such as word boundaries information Transcriptions will also vary depending on the writing conventions of the target language compare English Omar Khayyam with German Omar Chajjam both for عمر خيام ʕumar xajjaːm ˈʕomɑr xaejˈjaeːm unvocalized ʿmr ḫyam vocalized ʻUmar Khayyam A transliteration is ideally fully reversible a machine should be able to transliterate it back into Arabic A transliteration can be considered as flawed for any one of the following reasons A loose transliteration is ambiguous rendering several Arabic phonemes with an identical transliteration or such that digraphs for a single phoneme such as dh gh kh sh th rather than ḏ ġ ḫ s ṯ may be confused with two adjacent consonants but this problem is resolved in the ALA LC romanization system where the prime symbol ʹ is used to separate two consonants when they do not form a digraph 20 for example أ ك ر م ت ها akramatʹha she honored her in which the t and h are two distinct consonantal sounds Symbols representing phonemes may be considered too similar e g ʻ and or ʿ and ʾ for ع ʻayn and hamzah ASCII transliterations using capital letters to disambiguate phonemes are easy to type but may be considered unaesthetic A fully accurate transcription may not be necessary for native Arabic speakers as they would be able to pronounce names and sentences correctly anyway but it can be very useful for those not fully familiar with spoken Arabic and who are familiar with the Roman alphabet An accurate transliteration serves as a valuable stepping stone for learning pronouncing correctly and distinguishing phonemes It is a useful tool for anyone who is familiar with the sounds of Arabic but not fully conversant in the language One criticism is that a fully accurate system would require special learning that most do not have to actually pronounce names correctly and that with a lack of a universal romanization system they will not be pronounced correctly by non native speakers anyway The precision will be lost if special characters are not replicated and if a reader is not familiar with Arabic pronunciation Examples EditExamples in Literary Arabic Arabic أمجد كان له قصر إلى المملكة المغربيةArabic with diacritics normally omitted أ م ج د ك ان ل ه ق ص ر إ ل ى ال م م ل ك ة ال م غ ر ب ي ةIPA ʔamdʒadu kaːna lahuː qasˤr ʔila l mamlakati l maɣribij jah ALA LC Amjad kana lahu qaṣr Ila al mamlakah al MaghribiyahHans Wehr amjad kana lahu qaṣr ila l mamlaka al maḡribiyaDIN 31635 ʾAmǧad kana lahu qaṣr ʾIla l mamlakah al MaġribiyyahUNGEGN Amjad kana lahu qasr Ila al mamlakah al maghribiyyahISO 233 ʾˈamǧad kana lahu qaṣr ʾˈilaỳ ʾˈalmamlakaẗ ʾˈalmaġribiȳaẗArabTeX am gad kAna lahu qa sr il A almamlakaT alma gribiyyaTEnglish Amjad had a palace To the Moroccan KingdomArabic alphabet and nationalism EditThere have been many instances of national movements to convert Arabic script into Latin script or to romanize the language Lebanon Edit LEBNAAN in proposed Said Akl alphabet issue 686 A Beirut newspaper La Syrie pushed for the change from Arabic script to Latin script in 1922 The major head of this movement was Louis Massignon a French Orientalist who brought his concern before the Arabic Language Academy in Damascus in 1928 Massignon s attempt at romanization failed as the Academy and the population viewed the proposal as an attempt from the Western world to take over their country Sa id Afghani a member of the Academy asserted that the movement to romanize the script was a Zionist plan to dominate Lebanon 21 22 Egypt Edit After the period of colonialism in Egypt Egyptians were looking for a way to reclaim and reemphasize Egyptian culture As a result some Egyptians pushed for an Egyptianization of the Arabic language in which the formal Arabic and the colloquial Arabic would be combined into one language and the Latin alphabet would be used 21 22 There was also the idea of finding a way to use hieroglyphics instead of the Latin alphabet 21 22 A scholar Salama Musa agreed with the idea of applying a Latin alphabet to Egyptian Arabic as he believed that would allow Egypt to have a closer relationship with the West He also believed that Latin script was key to the success of Egypt as it would allow for more advances in science and technology This change in script he believed would solve the problems inherent with Arabic such as a lack of written vowels and difficulties writing foreign words 21 22 23 Ahmad Lutfi As Sayid and Muhammad Azmi two Egyptian intellectuals agreed with Musa and supported the push for romanization 21 22 The idea that romanization was necessary for modernization and growth in Egypt continued with Abd Al Aziz Fahmi in 1944 He was the chairman for the Writing and Grammar Committee for the Arabic Language Academy of Cairo 21 22 He believed and desired to implement romanization in a way that allowed words and spellings to remain somewhat familiar to the Egyptian people However this effort failed as the Egyptian people felt a strong cultural tie to the Arabic alphabet particularly the older generation 21 22 See also EditArabic chat alphabet Arabic diacritics Arabic grammar Arabic names Glottal stop letter Maltese alphabet Ottoman Turkish alphabet a Perso Arabic based alphabet which was replaced by the Latin based Turkish alphabet in 1928 Romanization of Hebrew Romanization of Persian Standard Arabic Technical Transliteration System SATTS References Edit a b c d e f Edward Lipinski 2012 Arabic Linguistics A Historiographic Overview pages 32 33 Romanization system for Arabic BGN PCGN 1956 System PDF a b c d Arabic PDF UNGEGN Technical reference manual for the standardization of geographical names PDF UNGEGN 2007 p 12 22 Systemes francais de romanisation PDF UNGEGN 2009 Arabic romanization table PDF The Library of Congress IJMES Translation amp Transliteration Guide International Journal of Middle East Studies Encyclopaedia of Islam Romanization vs ALA Romanization for Arabic University of Washington Libraries Brockelmann Carl Ronkel Philippus Samuel van 1935 Die Transliteration der arabischen Schrift PDF Leipzig a b Reichmuth Philipp 2009 Transcription In Versteegh Kees ed Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics Vol 4 Brill pp 515 20 Millar M Angelica Salgado Rosa Zedan Marcela 2005 Gramatica de la lengua arabe para hispanohablantes Santiago de Chile Editorial Universitaria pp 53 54 ISBN 978 956 11 1799 0 Standards Training Testing Assessment and Certification BSI Group Archived from the original on 7 October 2008 Retrieved 18 May 2014 ArabTex User Manual Section 4 1 ASCII Transliteration Encoding Buckwalter Arabic Transliteration QAMUS LLC Arabic Morphological Analyzer The Buckwalter Transliteration Xerox Retrieved 30 April 2017 Sullivan Natalie July 2017 Writing Arabizi Orthographic Variation in Romanized Lebanese Arabic on Twitter Plan II Honors Thesis doi 10 15781 T2W951823 hdl 2152 72420 Bjornsson Jan Arild November 2010 Egyptian Romanized Arabic A Study of Selected Features from Communication Among Egyptian Youth on Facebook PDF University of Oslo Retrieved 31 March 2019 Abu Elhija Dua a 3 July 2014 A new writing system Developing orthographies for writing Arabic dialects in electronic media Writing Systems Research 6 2 190 214 doi 10 1080 17586801 2013 868334 ISSN 1758 6801 S2CID 219568845 Arabizi sparks concern among educators GulfNews com 9 May 2013 Retrieved 18 May 2014 Arabic PDF ALA LC Romanization Tables Library of Congress p 9 Retrieved 14 June 2013 21 The prime ʹ is used a To separate two letters representing two distinct consonantal sounds when the combination might otherwise be read as a digraph a b c d e f g Shrivtiel Shraybom 1998 The Question of Romanisation of the Script and The Emergence of Nationalism in the Middle East Mediterranean Language Review pp 179 196 a b c d e f g History of Arabic Writing Shrivtiel p 188External links EditComparative table of DIN 31635 ISO 233 ISO R 233 UN ALA LC and Encyclopaedia of Islam PDF not normative Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Romanization of Arabic amp oldid 1141935783, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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