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. The examples and perspective in this article or section may not represent a worldwide view. ... Alif ﺍ is the first letter of the Arabic alphabet. ...   Beth or Bet is the second letter of many Semetic alphabets, including Phoenician, Hebrew, and Aramaic. ... Taw or Tav is the twenty-second and last letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic alphabet . Its original value is an voiceless alveolar plosive, IPA , The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Tau (Τ), Latin T, and the equivalent in the Cyrillic alphabet. ... () is one of the six letters the Arabic alphabet added to the twenty-two inherited from the Phoenician alphabet (the others being , , , , ). It represents the voiceless dental fricative (IPA ). In name and shape, it is a variant of . ...   Gimmel is the third letter of many Semitic alphabets, including Aramaic, Syriac, Phoenician and Hebrew. ...   Kheth or Het is the eighth letter of many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician, Hebrew, and Aramaic. ... () is one of the six letters the Arabic alphabet added to the twenty-two inherited from the Phoenician alphabet (the others being , , , , ). It represents the voiceless velar fricative (IPA ). In name and shape, it is a variant of (see also there). ... Dalet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia /**/ @import /skins-1. ... () is one of the six letters the Arabic alphabet added to the twenty-two inherited from the Phoenician alphabet (the others being , , , , ). It represents the voiced dental fricative (IPA ). In name and shape, it is a variant of . ... Resh is the twentieth letter of the Phoenician and Hebrew alphabets. ... Zayin or Zain is the seventh letter of many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician, Hebrew, and Aramaic. ... Shin (also spelled Sin or Sheen) is the twenty-first letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic (in abjadi order, 12th in modern order). ... Shin (also spelled Sin or Sheen) is the twenty-first letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic (in abjadi order, 12th in modern order). ... Tsade or Tsadi is the 18th letter in the Phoenician and Hebrew alphabets. ... () is one of the six letters the Arabic alphabet added to the twenty-two inherited from the Phoenician alphabet (the others being , , , , ). It represents a pharyngealized voiced alveolar plosive (IPA ). In name and shape, it is a variant of . ... (also Teth, Tet) is the ninth letter of many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew , Syriac and Arabic (in abjadi order, 16th in modern order). ... () is one of the six letters the Arabic alphabet added to the twenty-two inherited from the Phoenician alphabet (the others being , , , , ). It represents a = pharyngealized voiced dental or alveolar fricative (IPA or ). In name and shape, it is a variant of . ... Ayin is the sixteenth letter in many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician, Hebrew, and Aramaic. ... () is one of the six letters the Arabic alphabet added to the twenty-two inherited from the Phoenician alphabet (the others being , , , , ). It represents the voiced velar fricative (IPA ). In name and shape, it is a variant of . ... This is about the Hebrew letter: for the Cyrillic letter, see Pe (Cyrillic). ...   Qoph is the nineteenth letter in many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician, Hebrew, and Aramaic. ... Kaph (also spelled Kap or Kaf) is the eleventh letter of many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic alphabet . Its value is IPA . ... Lamed or Lamedh is the twelfth letter of the Phoenician and Hebrew alphabets. ... Mem is the thirteenth letter of the Phoenician and Hebrew alphabets. ... Nun is the fourteenth letter of the Phoenician and Hebrew alphabets. ... He is the fifth letter of the Phoenician and Hebrew alphabets. ...   Vav or waw is the sixth letter of many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic in abjadi order; it is the twenty-seventh in modern Arabic order. ... Yodh (also spelled Yud or Yod) is the tenth letter of many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew , Syriac and Arabic (in abjadi order, 28th in modern order). ... If certain characters in this article display badly (as empty squares, question marks, etc), see Unicode. ... In Arabic orthography, harakat are the diacritic marks used to represent vowel sounds. ... For Hamza, the letter in the Arabic alphabet, representing the glottal stop . ... The Eastern Arabic numerals (also called Eastern Arabic numerals, Arabic-Indic numerals, Arabic Eastern Numerals) are the symbols (glyphs) used to represent the Hindu-Arabic numeral system in conjunction with the Arabic alphabet in Egypt, Iran, Pakistan and parts of India, and also in the no longer used Ottoman Turkish... arabic numeration This page meets Wikipedias criteria for speedy deletion. ... The Arabic language ( ), or simply Arabic ( ), is the largest member of the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family (classification: South Central Semitic) and is closely related to Hebrew, Amharic and Aramaic. ... In human language, a phoneme is a set of phones (speech sounds or sign elements) that are cognitively equivalent. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... World map showing Europe A satellite composite image of Europe Europe is one of the seven traditional continents of the Earth. ... The examples and perspective in this article or section may not represent a worldwide view. ...

Problems

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. صدام حسين‎ would be ṣdʾm ḥsyn, 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, ṣaddām ḥussayn. 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 عمر خيام‎ (unvocalized ʿmr ḫyʾm, vocalized ʿumar ḫayyām). Transliteration is the practice of transcribing a word or text written in one writing system into another writing system. ... Transcription is the conversion into written, typewritten or printed form, of a spoken language source, such as the proceedings of a court hearing. ... Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majidida al-Tikriti (Arabic: ‎ [1]; born April 28, 1937[2]), was the President and dictator of Iraq from July 16, 1979 until April 9, 2003, when he was deposed during the United States-led 2003 invasion of Iraq. ... Tomb of Omar Khayam, Neishapur, Iran. ...

Most issues around the romanization are about transliterating vs. transcribing – others, about what should be romanized: In linguistics, romanization (or Latinization, also spelled romanisation or Latinisation) is the representation of a word or language with the Roman (Latin) alphabet, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system. ...

• 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) faithfully, 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, ẗ, ISO/R 233 uses superscript ^h, ^t.
• "broken alif" (alif maqṣura, ى) must be transliterated with a special symbol, but is transcribed 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 language 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. Sandhi is a cover term for a wide variety of phonological processes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries. ... In this article, phonemes are transliterated as in the article DIN 31635 (see also Arabic transliteration). ... The international standard ISO 233 establishes a system for Arabic transliteration (Romanization). ... A Semitic noun can take one of three states of definiteness: definite, indefinite or construct state. ...

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 ʿ and ʾ for ayin and hamza);
• ASCII transliterations using capital letters to disambiguate phonemes are easy to type but may be considered unaesthetic.

A further problem is that a transliteration which represents the letters exactly may be easily misread by non-Arabs, in particular with the use of the definite article (written "al" in arabic, but not necessarily pronounced as such). For instance an-nur (or an-nuur, or an-noor) would be more correctly transliterated along the lines of alnnur, but a hyphen is added and the unpronounced 'l' removed for the convenience of the uninformed non-Arab reader, who would otherwise pronounce an 'l', probably not understand the word to be nur, pronounce only one 'n', and be confused by the role of the double 'n'. Alternatively, if the shadda is not transliterated (since it is strictly not a letter), a hypercorrect transliteration would be alnur, which presents similar problems for the uninformed non-Arab reader. Ayin is the sixteenth letter in many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician, Hebrew, and Aramaic. ... For Hamza, the letter in the Arabic alphabet, representing the glottal stop . ... Ù‘ shadda marks the gemination (doubling) of a consonant. ...

A final problem is that all these problems produce the problem that a lot of time may be wasted worrying about transcription when it really doesn't matter. A reader who knows Arabic will normally be able to reconstruct the original however it has ben transliterated or transcribed, while a reader who does not know Arabic will not normally understand any of the systems anyhow, and simply be confused.

Transliteration standards

• 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 0-87950-003-4). [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]. This page meets Wikipedias criteria for speedy deletion. ... 1936 (MCMXXXVI) was a leap year starting on Wednesday (link will take you to calendar). ... Hans Wehr (1909-1981), German arabist who was professor at University of Münster from 1957-1974. ... 1961 (MCMLXI) was a common year starting on Sunday (the link is to a full 1961 calendar). ... The international standard ISO 233 establishes a system for Arabic transliteration (Romanization). ... 1984 (MCMLXXXIV) was a leap year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 1968 (MCMLXVIII) was a leap year starting on Monday (the link is to a full 1968 calendar). ... British Standards is the new name of the British Standards Institute and is part of BSI Group which also includes a testing organisation. ... SATTS is the Standard Arabic Technical Transliteration System, a US military standard for the mapping of Arabic letters to the Latin alphabet. ... The 1970s decade refers to the years from 1970 to 1979, inclusive. ... United Nations Statistical Commission or United Nations Statistical Office or UNSCO (also known as the Statistics Division) is a Functional Commission of the UN Economic and Social Council. ... 1972 (MCMLXXII) was a leap year starting on Saturday. ... DIN 31635 is a DIN standard for the transliteration of the Arabic language. ... 1982 (MCMLXXXII) was a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Deutsches Institut für Normung (DIN, the German Institute for Standardization) is a German national organization for standardization. ... The international standard ISO 233 establishes a system for Arabic transliteration (Romanization). ... 1984 (MCMLXXXIV) was a leap year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... This is about the tool known as a qalam. ... 1985 (MCMLXXXV) was a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 1993 (MCMXCIII) was a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar and marked the Beginning of the International Decade to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination (1993-2003). ... The Buckwalter Arabic transliteration was developed at Xerox by Tim Buckwalter in the 1990s. ... See also 1990s, the band Germans dancing on the Berlin Wall in late 1989, the symbol of the cold war divide falls down as the world unites in the 1990s. ... Xerox Corporation (NYSE: XRX) (pronounced ) is an American document management company, which manufactures and sells a range of color and black-and-white printers, multifunction systems, photo copiers, digital production printing presses, and related consulting services and supplies. ... A diacritical mark or diacritic, sometimes called an accent mark, is a mark added to a letter to alter a words pronunciation (i. ... Library of Congress, Jefferson building The Library of Congress is the unofficial national library of the United States. ... 1997 (MCMXCVII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... José Antonio Conde (1766-1820), Spanish Orientalist, was born at Peraleja (Cuenca) on 28 October 1766, and was educated at the university of Alcalá. His translation of Anacreon (1791) obtained him a post in the royal library in 1795, and in 1796-1797 he published paraphrases from Theocritus, Bion, Moschus... Alternative meaning: Nineteenth Century (periodical) (18th century — 19th century — 20th century — more centuries) As a means of recording the passage of time, the 19th century was that century which lasted from 1801-1900 in the sense of the Gregorian calendar. ...

Comparison table

SATTS is the Standard Arabic Technical Transliteration System, a US military standard for the mapping of Arabic letters to the Latin alphabet. ... The United Nations Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names takes place every five years at United Nations Headquarters in New York. ... The Great Hall interior. ... DIN 31635 is a DIN standard for the transliteration of the Arabic language. ... The international standard ISO 233 establishes a system for Arabic transliteration (Romanization). ... This is about the tool known as a qalam. ... For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words see here. ...

Online

Main article: Arabic Chat Alphabet

Online communication is often restricted to an ASCII environment in which not only the Arabic letters themselves but also Roman characters with diacritics are unavailable. This problem is faced by most speakers of languages that use non-Roman alphabets, or heavily modified ones. An ad hoc solution consists of using Arabic numerals which mirror or resemble the relevant Arabic. The Arabic Chat Alphabet is used to communicate in the Arabic language over the Internet or for sending messages via cellular phones when the actual Arabic alphabet is unavailable for technical reasons. ... Online means being connected to the Internet or another similar electronic network, like a bulletin board system. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... There are 95 printable ASCII characters, numbered 32 to 126. ... The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world. ... A diacritical mark or diacritic, sometimes called an accent mark, is a mark added to a letter to alter a words pronunciation (i. ... Ad hoc is a Latin phrase which means for this [purpose]. It generally signifies a solution that has been tailored to a specific purpose, such as a tailor-made suit, a handcrafted network protocol, and specific-purpose equation and things like that. ...

See also

• Arabic language
• Arabic alphabet
• Arabic grammar
• Romanization
• Arabic Chat Alphabet

The Arabic language ( ), or simply Arabic ( ), is the largest member of the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family (classification: South Central Semitic) and is closely related to Hebrew, Amharic and Aramaic. ... The examples and perspective in this article or section may not represent a worldwide view. ... Arabic is a Semitic language. ... In linguistics, romanization (or Latinization, also spelled romanisation or Latinisation) is the representation of a word or language with the Roman (Latin) alphabet, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system. ... The Arabic Chat Alphabet is used to communicate in the Arabic language over the Internet or for sending messages via cellular phones when the actual Arabic alphabet is unavailable for technical reasons. ...

External links

• Online en > ar transliteration tool
• SATTS: Roman-to-Arabic mappings
• Omniglot: Arabic alphabet, pronunciation and language
• J'raxis·Com: The Arabic Script
• Table comparing Romanization systems
• Learn the Arabic Script Online
• Arabic Transliteration Free online service to convert Arabic script to Roman and back, mainly in emails and on web pages.