From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Mon Aug 15 2005 - 14:49:39 CDT
From: "Gregg Reynolds" <unicode@arabink.com>
> Philippe Verdy wrote:
>> From: "Andreas Prilop" <nhtcapri@rrzn-user.uni-hannover.de>
> I believe (but I'm not certain) that the Encyclopedia of Islam uses "kh"
> with an underscore stretching across both letters. H with under dot is
> HAH.
>
> IJMES (International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies?) uses plain old
> "kh", if I'm not mistaken. I think they try to stick to ascii.
> Wright's Arabic Grammar (the standard in the English-speaking world) uses
> "h" with underscore.
All users of Arabic first names do not read an Encyclopedia, academic
papers, or even respect some ISO transliteration standard...
They are used much more largerly, and even the people that have such names
tend to write it the way they prefer to be understood. (see for example how
many Chinese people choose their romanized names: it's just a new choice,
often unrelated with their Chinese name, not even phonetically...).
So it's not surprizing that the romanization follows no standard given that
the Latin alphabet is intrinsicly not made to support Arabic sounds. And the
expected usage of these names is much larger than those that can speak or
read or write Arabic.
> In the chart of letters, it uses upper-case. In the text, proper names use
> initial upper-case, the rest use lower-case. E.g. your example would be
> "Haled" with the H underscored.
All my examples were lowercase with initial capital (titlecase), followed by
a all uppercase mapping.
> "x" is commonly used, at least in informal ascii-based and other
> translits.
Yes but it looks like a "geek" convention understood only by specialists of
Arabic when they wanted to communicate with obsolete ASCII-only terminals
and protocols... So this is deprecated. For most other people, "x" does not
fit well, because it translates to the equivalent of a "ks" ligation among
Latin users (not for Greek and Cyrillic native speakers where it is the
equivalent of a sharp "kh" ligation and still does not transcript well the
Arabic "k'h" sound...)
> I would be very surprised to see any transliteration using a mark on the h
> only, where it is used as part of a digraph to represent arabic khah. Or
> rather I would be surprised to see such a design gain market share.
It's not market, it's culture. Toponomyms and, even more importantly, people
names don't follow the market rules. Now add religious terms freely imported
into other languages, and you'll see that uneducated people in foreign
countries that can't read/write native Arabic will still need to write these
words with the script they have around them, or simply to communicate with
their children that have learnt another script.
Out of Topic Note: did you notice the placement problem with the COMBINING
DOT BELOW in the Verdana font on Windows XP, as shown in my previous
message?
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