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Which transliteration schemes should we use? #16
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Agree with you to establish some standard approach to transliterating Arabic and Persian words. |
BTW, it is رُقعة not رِقعة AFAIK. |
In fact, Riqa’ is (one of) the plurals of Roq’a A dictionary of Arabic meanings Some other dictionary has the same position. Comment: Najib |
They are two different things, الرقاع is an early Arabic style that fell out of use, while رُقعة is a much more recent style invented by Ottoman calligraphers. Some authors confuse them and think they are the same thing. |
Here is some information about Arabic transcription in a handy form. Wikipedia also lists transcription schemes for Persian: |
(By the way, fwiw, i'm working on Arabic and Persian pickers, which should eventually be able to produce transcriptions automatically or semi-automatically, which may help for consistency when creating content. You can see the kind of thing by going to http://rishida.io/pickers/bengali/ pasting in ছখজদ and clicking on the 'toISO' button. There's some ambiguity about the appropriate transcription for the end – just click on one of characters on the yellow background to resolve that.) |
Riqa' vs Roq'a |
As fascinating as etymology "رُقعة" and "رِقعة" is to me I guess the intention was to agree on using an existing transliteration scheme here; either from those linked here by Richard or from any other resource that you encountered in your research. Any thoughts on that? |
fwiw, there's an early version of an Arabic picker at http://r12a.github.io/pickers/arabic/. I mention it because it may help to take out some of the guesswork and bring some consistency when creating transcriptions of Arabic words in our text. if you paste in a word such as رُقعَة and click on Hints: don't add vowels to the definite article (ال), but put them just about everwhere else; no need usually for sukun; still need to work on some īya sequences; read the notes for more info about how to use the picker. |
btw, the picker has a couple of additional functions that may prove handy when editing the alreq doc. if you want to mention an arabic letter with its Unicode name and code point in the text, highlight the letter in the picker (or make it the sole character in the box) and click on
actually you can do this for multiple code points at the same time, if you want. alternatively, if you want to produce an example for the text, input or highlight the relevant text and click on
will produce
in either of the above cases, just triple click on the output and copy then paste into the source. |
i recommend we follow http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/romanization/arabic.pdf for the Arabic transcriptions. (The rules in that document are taken into account in the picker.) |
I checked ALA-LC’s Persian transliteration method. It seems reasonable a lot of times, but some of its rules, specially with vowels, seems a bit strange for me, like using “i” and “u” where I expected “e” and “o”. I found UN 2012 (documented here and here) a bit more familiar. |
In general, I am not inclined to "very strict" transcription. (I prefer to read iman rather than īmān etc.) |
Okay, one open question here is transliteration choice for Persian. |
I had a long overdue action item to take a look at transliteration schemes available (ALA vs. UNGEN proposed by Iranian ICSGN National/NCC organizations). I tend to agree that UNGEN scheme of 2012 is more reflective of common transliteration practices; e.g. Encyclopedia Iranica scheme. As Mostafa mentioned, ALA treatment of "e" and "o" is peculiar. |
Just to clarify the resolution of this issue: for transcriptions, we decided to use LOC for Arabic, and UNGEN for Persian. And we use those as transcriptions, not transliterations: ie. they don't necessarily allow unambiguous reconversion back to the arabic script, although they may be closer to the actual phonetics than a transliteration. |
Looking at the way Najib spelled 'Riqaa' made me realise that we need to establish some standard approach to transliterating Arabic and Persian words. I really don't want this to get in the way of creating real content for the document, but it's something we should take a look at (and spend as little time on as possible).
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