A note on phonetic transcription

p. 9


Texte intégral

1Since this book is intended for the general public we have chosen to use a simplified form of transcription based upon Egyptian dialectal Arabic as it sounds to the English ear, and thus understandable by the non-Arabic speaker but not as would be found in scholarly publications. For example, we have not distinguished between long and short vowels, or between the letters kaf and qaf. The definite article has been transcribed as either al- or el-, though the second is perhaps more common. The letter ayn has generally been transcribed as “aa” in the middle of a word and as “a” at the beginning, with exceptions. While this compromise may be considered unsatisfactory in that it ignores the subtleties of Arabic pronunciation we hope that linguists and experts on the region will be forgiving and we would direct them to the Arabic language version of this atlas. Overall we have preferred what is practical rather then what is standard. Names of people and places have been rendered as they commonly appear in non-specialist contexts.

2Words followed by an asterisk are defined in the glossary at the end of the book.


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