Mind your ʾ's and ʿ's

[muckefuck]

As much as I dislike some of the orthographic kludges which ASCII has forced upon various orthographies and their romanisations, I do have to admire their robustness. Right now, I'm reading two books with plenty of Arabic names in them (Elias Khoury's Gate of the Sun and Tim Mackintosh-Smith's Travels with a Tangerine) and the popular typographical convention of leaving out any diacritics which might "confuse" the delicate monolingual reader is really annoying me. Want to look up a simple name like "al-Ghutah"? Well, you might have to check in a half-dozen different places in the dictionary depending on whether the stressed vowel is really /u/ or /ū/, the medial consonant /t/ or /ṭ/, and the final /h/ or /ḥ/. (Let's not even get into the question of whether the "gh" is really /ɣ/ or a dialectal realisation of /q/.) It doesn't help matters, of course, that the alternatives are nowhere near each other in traditional alphabetic order. ("Ḥ", for instance, is the sixth letter of the Arabic alphabet, whereas "h" comes dead last.) After a while, the common 'Net convention of writing "7" in place of "ḥ" (for <ح‎>) begins to look pretty damn sensible.

Also, whoever thought it was a good idea to use apostrophes (and their like) to transcribe anything should be squeezed to death by a greengrocer. I've complained numerous times already about their use to represent aspiration in McCune-Reischauer and Wade-Giles, since of course "ko" and "k'o" are completely different words in both Korean and Chinese (and, similarly, nowhere near each other in most phonetic indexes). Now imagine the fun in Arabic where one sound (the hamza or glottal stop) is <ʾ> and another (the ʿayn or pharyngeal approximate) is <ʿ>. Some works substitute the IPA symbols (respectively, <ʔ> and <ʕ>), but you can see how this isn't exactly a major improvement. I'm tempted to go through my entire Arabic self-instruction book and overwrite every <ʿ> with either <3> or <9>. (The former is a common 'Net convention, the latter one I've seen in a few other paedagogical works.)

Comments

[wwidsith.livejournal.com]

What's Travels with a Tangerine like? I keep almost getting a copy. I have kind of resigned myself to never reading Ibn Battuta, so I guess this is the next best thing..

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

It's hard to predict your reaction, since the bits which strike me as charmingly and quintessentially "English" you might find twee and cloyingly posh. I recommend reading an excerpt or two first to get a feel for his curlicued prose.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

I liked Yemen, but it felt very much like a first outing. Not recommended: Colin Thubron, whose prose is not so much curlicued as gargoyled.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

What the hell is up with the adjective "Márquesian" in the Observer review?

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

Makes me wonder if they got Thubron to write it. I should probably alert Steven Poole so he can add it to his Observer hate file: all jungles are Márquesian in the Observer.

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

I stick with 3 and 7 if I have to romanize Arabic words -- especially in smaller print, the apostrophe is no help whatsoever. It's here where I say -- I hate romanized Arabic for this very reason. It's about as clear as concrete when written and the multiple possibilities for the same Arabic letter don't help any (to say nothing about regional variants, as you point out with gh and q).

[strongaxe.livejournal.com]

Such problems are inevitable whenever you try to represent a large number of symbols with a smaller number of symbols. It already happens in languages that natively use diacritics as a kludge to represent multiple different sounds with a single Latin letter, and is not helped by the fact that some of these languages lexically sort the accented letters with the base letter, some sort them after the base letter, and some sort them as a totally different letter, usually at the end of the alphabet. It's even worse when a letter pair is used instead of a single letter, and is similarly sorted as if it was a single unique letter. Fortunately, with the vast proliferation of language-agnostic computers, many such idiosyncrasies are slowly going away.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I agree that they can never be avoided entirely, but the relative superiority of, say, Yale to McCune-Reischauer and Pinyin to Wade-Giles demonstrates how much can be done to avoid confusion if that's actually your goal.