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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.

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[edit]

Romanization is often termed "transliteration", but this is not technically correct.[1] 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, do not usually appear in Arabic writing. As an example, the above rendering munāẓaratu l-ḥurÅ«fi l-Ê»arabÄ«yah of the Arabic: مناظرة Ø§Ù„حروف Ø§Ù„عربية is a transcription, indicating the pronunciation; an example transliteration would be mnaẓrḧ alḥrwf alÊ»rbyḧ.

Vocabulista, 1505. A Spanish-Arabic glossary with its own system of transcription.[3]

Pedro de Alcalá

Doctrina Cristiana, 1556. Valencia. Prayers with an Arabic conventions and pronunciation annex.[4]

Martín Pérez de Ayala

Lexicon Pentaglotton: Hebraicum, Chaldicum, Syriacum, Talmudico-Rabbinicum, et Arabicum, 1612. Arabic lemmas were printed in Hebrew characters.[3]

Valentin Schindler

Lexicon Arabicum, Leiden 1613. The first printed dictionary of the Arabic language in Arabic characters.[3]

Franciscus Raphelengius

Lexicon Arabico-Latinum, Leiden 1653. The dominant Arabic dictionary in Europe for almost two centuries.[3]

Jacobus Golius

Lexicon Arabico-Latinum, praesertim ex Djeuharii Firuzubadiique et aliorum libris confectum I–IV, Halle 1830–1837[3]

Georg Freytag

Arabic–English Lexicon, 8 vols, London-Edinburgh 1863–1893. Highly influential, but incomplete (stops at Kaf)[3]

Edward William Lane

Some transliterations ignore 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.

assimilation

tāʼ marbūṭah

"Restricted alif" (alif maqṣūrah, ى) should be transliterated with an , á, differentiating it from regular alif ا, but it is transcribed in many schemes like alif, ā, because it stands for /aː/.

acute accent

: 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.

Nunation

Arabic chat alphabet

Arabic diacritics

Arabic grammar

Arabic names

Glottal stop (letter)

Maltese alphabet

– a Perso-Arabic-based alphabet, which was replaced by the Latin-based Turkish alphabet in 1928

Ottoman Turkish alphabet

Romanization of Hebrew

Romanization of Persian

(SATTS)

Standard Arabic Technical Transliteration System

(PDF; not normative)

Comparative table of DIN 31635, ISO 233, ISO/R 233, UN, ALA-LC, and Encyclopædia of Islam