Page 18 - UAE Truncal States
P. 18

!!















        Note on Transliteration






        The author and the publisher had hoped to be able to spare the
        reader the inconvenience of diacritical marks over and under Arabic
        words and names. But it is even more important to render, in
        particular the less well-known tribal names, into English in such a      j
                                                                                 ij
        way that the Arabic-speaking reader can reproduce the original
        version. Because for an English d, t, th, s and h there is more than one
        Arabic letter and sound, one has to resort to dashes and dots or a
        combination of two letters in order to accommodate the full range of    .
        the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet.                                  !
          The system employed throughout this book makes use of the
        familiar two-letter combination for rendering the letters Tha ,
        Kha £ , Shin J* , Dha and Ghain . They are th, kh, sh, dh
                                                                                ,!
        and gh, thus reducing the occurrence of diacritical marks. All other
        letters and the sign Hamza are transliterated as in the Dictionary of
        Modern Written Arabic by Hans Wehr. The reader is referred to the       ;
        complete list of the Arabic and English letters on page xxi.
          With hesitation the author decided not to use vowels other than a,
        i, and u, even if the pronunciation is in some instances much nearer to
        o or e. The choice of these three most distinctive vowels is a common
        compromise, also used in Wehr’s Dictionary, to reproduce the three
        signs Fatha, Kasra and Damma which are part of the Arabic script       I
        although they are hardly ever written. However, if and when these
                                                                               i
        signs are added in their places above and below consonants of an
        Arabic text, this process has to follow the rules of Arabic grammar.
        But colloquial Arabic, regionally coined words, local adaptations of
        foreign languages (particularly Farsi, Urdu and Hindi) and local
        place names and tribal names are not always governed by these
        rules. In some instances there may be some difference of opinion as to

                                                                 xix
   13   14   15   16   17   18   19   20   21   22   23