Page 18 - UAE Truncal States

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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