This means there probably has to be a look-ahead function to make sure that these are accounted for. Here, I am thinking of the definite article ال (al-), dipthongs like وَ (au), and the shaddah ّ which doubles letters. Handling dipthongs, doubled letters, and reoccurring constructions. But the point is that the logic isn’t immediately obvious.ģ. There is probably some logic behind when one of these letters is a long vowel and when it is a consonant.
But in سوريا (Syria, or Sūriyā), it is a consonant. For instance, in حسني (ḥusnī), yā’ is a long vowel. Sometimes they are long vowels and sometimes they are consonants. The letters و (wāw) and ي (yā’) play double duty in Arabic. It is not simple to determine whether certain letters (و and ي) should be long vowels or consonants. The good news is that short vowels are ASCII characters (a, i, u) and can be inserted by the reader.Ģ. In any case, short vowels are probably the biggest impediment to a fully automated system. Luckily, most of the time we don’t really care about case endings. The former seems eminently more plausible than the latter, but even so, given the rules of Arabic grammar, it would be necessary to do some kind of part-of-speech tagging to determine the case endings of words (if you really want to know more about this twisted system, other people have explained this much better than I can). I can suggest two solutions to this problem: either use a robust dictionary that can map words without vowels to their voweled equivalent, or have some kind of rule set that determines which vowels must be inserted into the word. The average Arabic reader will know that بسم should be “bismi” and not “bsm.” So what does this mean for transliteration? Well, it means that you can’t transliterate words precisely unless the machine knows which word you’re going for. But this doesn’t occur in most modern books, signs, and especially newspaper and social media text. In the Qu’ran, all vowels are usually written.
For example, compare the opening of al-Faatiha in the Qu’ran with vowels: But in most modern Arabic writing, short vowels are not written in because readers are expected to know them. There are no silent letters and vowels denote verb form and casing. Most Arabic writing does not include short vowels.Īrabic is a very precise language (I focus the rest of this article on Arabic because I don’t know much about Persian). How hard would it be to write a character mapping and throw up a PHP interface? Well, it’s not that simple.
When Ella posted the tweet, I thought that programming this would be a piece of cake. That means a lot of copy-pasta of individual Unicode characters from the character viewers in your OS or some text file that stores them. The transliterated characters are not in the ASCII character set that is mostly used by English and other Western languages, and many of its characters are largely drawn from Unicode (e.g. ḥ). For example, حسني مبارك (Hosni Mubarak) is transliterated as ḥusnī mubārak.
It’s nice that the IJMES has an agreed upon transliteration system it makes academic work much more legible and minimizes quarrels about translation (hypothetically). It’s in very initial stages and I will discuss some of the difficulties of making it more robust below. Prompted by a tweet yesterday from Ella Wind, an editor at the great Arab commentary site Jadaliyya, I undertook the task of writing a very quick and dirty converter that takes Arabic or Persian text and converts it to the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES) transliteration system (details here ).
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