(AND PRONUNCIATION, AND BULLSHIT)
“THERE IS NO UNIVERSALLY ACCEPTED FORM for transliterating Arabic,” as the Chicago Manual of Style puts it. There are many standards, like dialects along a spectrum of academicness—some importing useful symbols, some using only the letters you’d find in English—but there’s no one way, and there are puzzles in every choice.
Luckily, English is surprisingly well-stocked with the phonemes for the 28 letters of the Arabic abjad (so called because it begins a-b-j-d). Choices here have been made, while staying true to proper spelling, with an underlying goal: that a non–Arabic-speaking friend could read straight off the page and have the best shot at being understood.
Even though there are two kinds of t, s, and d—one just like English, and one called “emphatic” because it should affect surrounding vowels as if the speaker has just gained a hundred pounds in his face alone—these are spelled out here with the same Latin letter. (The unemphatic letters are far more common.)
There are two Arabic letters for the English digraph th—voiced (“this”) and voiceless (“fifth”)—and an emphatic third, too. These are all th here.
There are two kinds of h: the kind you know, and a squeezed kind that puts more air through less space. Both are simply h here—and people will probably understand if you misspeak on the softer side. There is a kh, the sound cats’ claws make or the sound Russians make when they laugh, and a gh, like a quick gargle. (Sh also comes from a single letter. There is no p.)
Occasionally, there are unavoidable troubles for the simple approach. The name for literary Arabic, transliterated Fusha, is spoken “FuS-Ha.” The u is pronounced like the “oo” in “foot” (and not like the “u” in “flute”), because the s is that emphatic kind that fattens up the neighboring vowels.
Mistaking k for q is more common: this is the difference between your neighborhood voiceless velar plosive and a voiceless uvular plosive. That is to say: the difference between the unspecial kaf, and the qaf, the consonant made by clicking the place deep in your throat where smoke rings come from. That is to say: the difference in where your tongue hits your throat makes the difference between kalbi! and qalbi!—“my dog!” and “my heart!”
Occasionally, transliterations shift to match pronunciation: janbiya becomes jambiya (mostly), because that’s how it (mostly) comes out. The stimulant leaf qat (sometimes spelled khat in English, but always spelled q-a-t in Arabic) becomes gat, then chat to match the-way-you’d-say-it in Yemen, then Somaliland.
The most technical distinction retained in this book’s transliterations is between two letters that, without using special markings, are both written as an apostrophe: one forward and one backward. The ’ stands in for the Arabic hamza, a glottal stop that sounds exactly like the hyphen in the word “uh-oh.” The ‘ is the ubiquitous ayn, a vowel during which you choke briefly, and then set yourself free. (Because it makes noise, and isn’t over in an instant, it is written in the book—almost always—as ‘a.)
Proper nouns are written, however, in the simplest twenty-six-letters-only way in which they are already known in English: Sanaa, Baath Party, Shia. (Keeping all its letters intact, the Yemeni capital, often written Sana’a, could by more precise rules come out as Sana‘aa’—or even San‘aaa’.)
Mada’in (ma-da-in) Saleh, as a small exception, has kept its apostrophe because it’s already hard enough to find without asking the Saudis for directions to Madane Saleh—but maybe also because, as with Jonathan Raban in the 1970s, Saudi denied me visas to visit (because there were no visas to visit), and so remains just that much more foreign to me, known only by its little markings.
With no intention of erasing a word’s history, the general choice to pluck apostrophes from place names may commit the cardinal sin Junot Díaz warned against: “I’d rather have us start out as fractured so we don’t commit the bullshit and erasures that trying to live under the banner of sameness entails.” My hope is that we can marinate in the differences—the foreign sounds we absorb without thinking, and the markings of all that uvular action—and then come to rest in a place where we remember that most of our history is never on the surface anyway. Otherwise, relentlessly maintaining apostrophes is a bit like asking a professional skydiver to wear a parachute to a dinner party.
Aspiring to an understanding a bit deeper than a glottal stop, and in accordance with the Eleventh Commandment—that saying “Fronce” instead of “France” does not make you cool—there is only one prerequisite: recognizing that any Arabic word in English context will always be different than an Arabic word in Arabic. Eventually, after a successful import, words lose their italics and become permanent residents or full citizens of the English language. Hawai’i becomes Hawaii.
And possibly because the iPhone suggests “Ba’ath,” and the New York Times writes “Baath,” and because both are technically fair—I think I might also be taking the side of humanity over the machine—if only because algorithm (from al-Khwarizmi) is a word that went through just that kind of human process.
