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\nQalam: A Convention for Morphological
\nArabic-Latin-Arabic Transliteration
\n—
\nAbdelsalam Heddaya (heddaya@cs.bu.edu)<\/p>\n
with contributions from<\/p>\n
Walid Hamdy (hamdy@lids.mit.edu)
\nM. Hashem Sherif (mhs@homxa.att.com)
\n—
\nCreated: 1985.11
\nModified: 1986-1989 often
\nModified: 1990.01
\nModified: 1990.12.21
\nModified: 1990.12.31; accepted LAiLA upper case convention,
\nadded punctuation, ,
\nand
\nModified: 1991.01.23; added a couple of sentences.
\nModified: 1991.01.31; decided for
\nModified: 1991.08.22; cleaned up acknowledgements
\nModified: 1992.01.13; changed back to
\n—
\nDRAFT—DRAFT—DRAFT
\n—<\/p>\n
0. Introduction
\n—————<\/p>\n
Qalam is an Arabic-Latin-Arabic transliteration system between the
\nArabic script and the Latin script embodied in the ASCII (American
\nStandard Code for Information Interchange) character set. The goal of
\nthe Qalam system is to transliterate Arabic script for computer
\ncommunication by those literate in the language. The main
\nconsideration in the design of Qalam is suitability for
\ntransliteration, as well as reverse transliteration, both manually by
\nhumans and automatically by computers. Qalam also includes several
\nArabic script letters used to transliterate other languages *into*
\nArabic script. Finally, Qalam aims to serve all Arabic script
\nlanguages, such as Farsi, Urdu, and Ottoman.<\/p>\n
Qalam is a morphological system in the sense that Arabic script
\nwords are transliterated based on spelling and diacritics (the marks
\nthat represent vowels in Arabic), rather than on phonetics. This
\nmakes it easy to deduce the Arabic script word from its
\ntransliteration (i.e., to transliterate the word back into Arabic
\nscript). The pronounciation of words, however, can still be deduced
\nfrom the transliteration, because the (optional) inclusion of
\ndiacritic marks makes the transliterated word more pronouncable.<\/p>\n
We describe Qalam’s mapping between Arabic letters and diacritics
\nto ASCII characters. Each Arabic letter or diacritic maps into (and
\nback from) one or two ASCII characters. The choice is made in order
\nto approximate, as much as possible, the Arabic pronounciation, while
\nmaintaining the one-to-one morphological correspondence needed for
\nunambiguousness of reverse transliteration into Arabic script.<\/p>\n
Arabic script letters that do not correspond to Latin sounds are
\nrepresented with upper case letters or with two character sequences.
\nThus, Qalam uses upper-case ASCII characters to denote Arabic letters
\nthat are different from those denoted by the corresponding lower-case
\ncharacters. This convention deviates from the common practice of
\ninserting a dot beneath the letter or a dash above it.<\/p>\n
We give below the list of transliterations for Arabic letters and
\ndiacritics, followed by an example and a description of the rules of
\ntransliteration.<\/p>\n
1. Character Mappings:
\n———————-
\n1.1. Letters:
\n————-<\/p>\n
hamza ‘
\n‘alef aa zayn z qaaf q
\nbaa’ b syn s kaaf k
\ntaa’ t shyn sh laam l
\nthaa’ th Saad S mym m
\njym j Daad D nuwn n
\nHaa’ H Taa’ T haa’ h
\nkhaa’ kh Zaa’ Z waaw w
\ndaal d `ayn ` yaa’ y
\ndhaal dh ghayn gh
\nraa’ r faa’ f<\/p>\n
taa’ marbuwTah t or h
\nhaa’ marbuwTah h<\/p>\n
‘alef maqSuwrah ae
\nhamzat alwaSl e<\/p>\n
1.2. Transliteration Letters:
\n—————————–<\/p>\n
These are characters used in the Arabic script to represent or
\ntransliterate letters from other languages such as
\nEnglish, French, German, etc.<\/p>\n
Egyptian sound g (= Arabic script with bar
\nor dots, pronounced
\nor )
\nEnglish “v” sound v (= Arabic script with
\nthree dots)
\nEnglish “p” sound p (= Arabic script with
\nthree dots)<\/p>\n
1.3. Diacritics :
\n————————–<\/p>\n
fatHah a
\nkasrah i
\nDammah u
\nshaddah double previous letter
\nmaddah ~aa
\nsukuwn –
\ntanwyn N<\/p>\n
1.4. Punctuation:
\n—————-<\/p>\n
question mark ?
\ndouble quotes <>
\nsingle quotes
\n,<\/p>\n
2. Examples:
\n———–<\/p>\n
The Qalam transliteration of the first in the ,
\ncalled goes as follows:<\/p>\n
bismi ellaahi elraHmaani elraHym<\/p>\n
‘alHamdu lillaahi rabbi el`aalamyn *
\nalraHmaani elraHym *
\nmaaliki yawmi eldyn *
\n‘iyaaka na`budu wa’iyaaka nasta`yn *
\n‘ihdinaa elSiraaTa elmustaqym *
\nSiraaTa alladhyna ‘an`amta `alayhim *
\nghayri elmaghDuwbi `alayhim *
\nwalaa alDaalyn *<\/p>\n
3. Qalam Rules and Conventions:
\n——————————-<\/p>\n
Transliterate a word by following its Arabic script spelling letter by
\nletter, as well as any available diacritics (i.e., or
\n), and substituting the specified Latin script. The only
\nfrequent exception is the in the definite article (i.e.,
\n), which is better to write as if it is a ,
\nor (, or ) as the case may be.<\/p>\n
Diacritics are optional unless they are necessary to disambiguate
\nthe original Arabic script spelling. For example, the verb
\nmay be written , because the ambiguity does not affect the
\noriginal Arabic script spelling. On the other hand,<\/p>\n
may stand
\nfor a as in the word or for a followed by a
\nas in , in which case the between the and
\nthe is necessary.<\/p>\n
The with a transliterates to if the
\nis above, and to if it is below. That is, it is treated as if it
\nis simply a with a or .<\/p>\n
The definite article (equivalent to “the” in English) should
\nnot be separated from the rest of the word by a hyphen; e.g.
\n, meaning “the sun.” Write the even if it is
\nsilent–. This is a case where literal transliteration is
\ngiven precedence over phonetic transliteration to make reverse
\ntransliteration easy.<\/p>\n
Observe word boundaries in the original Arabic, e.g.
\nis wrong, but is right.<\/p>\n
Arabic has no capitalization, and hence Arabic script
\ntransliterated by Qalam uses capitals to stand for letters that are
\ndifferent from those denoted by the corresponding lower case character.<\/p>\n
As a convention, we quote transliterated Arabic script text
\nembedded in another script with Arabic script quotation marks and vice
\nversa.<\/p>\n
4. Technical Discussion:
\n————————<\/p>\n
We would like to argue that Qalam is a superior code for communicating
\nArabic script text over data networks between heterogeneous computers.
\nQalam possesses the characteristics required of a good communication
\ncode: unambiguity, compactness, and simplicity of coding\/decoding.<\/p>\n
(((Compatibility, Human readability, Code efficiency. Existing
\ncodes.)))<\/p>\n
Qalam’s goals include supporting automatic transliteration by
\ncomputers, as well as manual transliteration for typing in Arabic
\nscript using Latin script available on ASCII terminals. This permits
\ncomputers that support the Arabic script directly to hide the
\ntransliterated text from the user. Thus, a personal computer user,
\nfor example, should be able to type in Arabic script a message, and
\nhave the machine transliterate it for submission to
\nsoc.culture.lebanon. Conversely, when this user receives an Arabic
\nscript message from soc.culture.lebanon, the computer would transliterate it
\nback into Arabic script for display. The above scenario should hold
\nequally true for text that mixes Latin and Arabic scripts.<\/p>\n
5. Bugs:
\n——–<\/p>\n
The , should be distinct from the and
\nboth must differ from the . Qalam doesn’t provide for
\ntransliterating the written as a vertical bar shaped
\ndiacritic, as in archaic spellings of the . The only way to
\ndistinguish digraphs such as from the identically
\ntransliterated followed by , is to force the inclusion of
\na diacritic vowel between the two letters. Qalam needs a method to do
\nso without including the vowel, since it’s not always available in the
\noriginal Arabic script text.<\/p>\n
6. Acknowledgements:
\n——————–<\/p>\n
Nayel el-Shafei provided the initial impetus for this work by
\nresearching the various transliteration systems in use in the US, and
\npublishing the results on egypt-net in July 1985. C.I. Browne
\n(cib%a@lanl.gov) provided, in August 1988, useful comments about the
\nplacement of “.” (no longer in use by Qalam) and pointed out that
\nwas missing in an earlier draft of Qalam. Ali Mili, of the
\nUniversity of Tunis, commented on an early version of Qalam.<\/p>\n
Stavros Macrakis pointed out the absence of a convention for and the old form of that appears as a vertical bar
\ndiacritic (e.g., in the ). The first problem has been
\ncorrected, but the second remains. In winter 1990\/91, a debate
\nsurfaced on USENET about transliterating Arabic text, one particular
\nproposal, called LAiLA, convinced us to use upper case Latin letters
\ninstead of special characters.<\/p>\n
References:
\n———-<\/p>\n
@article{Becker87,
\nAUTHOR = “J.D. Becker”,
\nTITLE = “Arabic word processing”,
\nJOURNAL = “Communications of the ACM”,
\nVOLUME = “30”,
\nNUMBER = “7”,
\nPAGES = “600–611”,
\nMONTH = “July”,
\nYEAR = “1987”}<\/p>\n
@article{Becker84,
\nAUTHOR = “J.D. Becker”,
\nTITLE = “Multilingual word processing”,
\nJOURNAL = “Scientific American”,
\nVOLUME = “251”,
\nNUMBER = “1”,
\nPAGES = “”,
\nMONTH = “July”,
\nYEAR = “1984”}<\/p>\n
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