# Transliterating Between English and Arabic **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [November 24, 2011, 6:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/transliterating-between-english-and-arabic/603992 "2011-11-24T18:44:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![HeyHomie](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/heyhomie/32/207_2.png) [@HeyHomie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HeyHomie)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2011, 6:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/transliterating-between-english-and-arabic/603992/1 "2011-11-24T18:44:14Z")
[This article](http://news.yahoo.com/us-military-legacy-rubs-off-iraqi-youth-165333231.html) mentions a young Iraqi man who wanted to get the word “Gangsta” tattooed on his body and wound up with “Gang Star.” Why the guy didn’t just write the letters G-a-n-g-s-t-a on a slip of paper and tell the tattoo artist to copy it is beyond me, but that’s neither here nor there. What I want to know is, can one transliterate the sounds that make “gangsta” syllable-by-syllable into Arabic, or is it going to come out as “gangstar”? Much like “Christmas” comes out in Japanese as Ku-ri-su-ma-su, since the language doesn’t have direct analogues to all of the syllables. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2011, 7:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/transliterating-between-english-and-arabic/603992/2 "2011-11-24T19:04:57Z")
The arabic alphabet and the Roman alphabet have the same source, so they are quite similar. Comparisons to Katakana aren’t correct. One major difference with Arabic is that the vowels are not written, but that doesn’t explain this situation. Perhaps the guy was trying to write “gangster”, with the “r” and the vowel just got inferred wrong. There is a way to write vowels, if you want to, using some extra strokes, so maybe the wrong one was used. Also, keep in mind that English has an unusual way of pronouncing vowels, making it difficult to transliterate without swapping them or modifying them somehow. Also, if Allah can be written in Arabic, and I’m pretty sure it can :), then Gangstah could also be written. ---
**Author:** ![Hail\_Ants](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/dc4da7/32.png) [@Hail\_Ants](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hail_Ants)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2011, 1:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/transliterating-between-english-and-arabic/603992/3 "2011-11-25T01:07:27Z")
Ahhhhhh, ok, I have to ask, what do you mean ‘the vowels are not written’? How then do you know what they are? Is it that specific vowel sounds are always only preceded by the same specific consonants? ---
**Author:** ![Terr](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/839c29/32.png) [@Terr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Terr)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2011, 1:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/transliterating-between-english-and-arabic/603992/4 "2011-11-25T01:36:04Z")
> [@Hail\_Ants](#): > > Ahhhhhh, ok, I have to ask, what do you mean ‘the vowels are not written’? How then do you know what they are? Is it that specific vowel sounds are always only preceded by the same specific consonants? The (well, some) vowels are not included when writing the word. I know this from Hebrew, but Arabic is similar enough. For example, there is a letter in Hebrew for the “o” or “u” sounds and sometimes for “i” (well, the “eee”) sound, but not (usually) for “a” or “e”. For example, the word “Shabbat” in Hebrew is written with three letters - shin, bet, taf, and the two “a” vowels are implied. Arabic is based on the same principle. Kids’ texts (and sometimes religious texts) are written with “nikud” - that is, there are dots above, below or inside letters that indicate what vowel follows. But most writing doesn’t have such markings. The word formation in both Arabic and Hebrew is pretty strict, so the vowels are “implied” and the speaker of the language knows the word from just the consonants. That doesn’t work for foreign words though. ---
**Author:** ![Hail\_Ants](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/dc4da7/32.png) [@Hail\_Ants](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hail_Ants)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2011, 1:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/transliterating-between-english-and-arabic/603992/5 "2011-11-25T01:45:57Z")
Soooo, it’s kind of like a shorthand? IOW if I wrote: **f u cn rd ths u cn spk nglsh wll** you’d be able to figure out its:\*\* if you can read this you can speak English well\*\*? ---
**Author:** ![Terr](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/839c29/32.png) [@Terr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Terr)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2011, 1:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/transliterating-between-english-and-arabic/603992/6 "2011-11-25T01:51:04Z")
> [@Hail\_Ants](#): > > Soooo, it’s kind of like a shorthand? IOW if I wrote: > > **f u cn rd ths u cn spk nglsh wll** > > you’d be able to figure out its:\*\* if you can read this you can speak English well\*\*? Kinda. Except for example that first “f” in English could be “if” or “of”. “ths” could be “this”, “thus”, “these” or “those” and “wll” could be “well” or “wall” or “will”. In Hebrew (and I presume, Arabic), such possible ambiguities are much less widespread. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2011, 7:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/transliterating-between-english-and-arabic/603992/7 "2011-11-25T07:35:05Z")
Terr pretty much covered it. I’d also like to note that Arabic and English writing don’t cover the same range of consonants. Arabic has several guttrals that don’t exist in English, as well as a different letter for each pronunciation of “th”; OTOH, it lacks the letter “P”. ---
**Author:** ![CookingWithGas](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cookingwithgas/32/485_2.png) [@CookingWithGas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CookingWithGas)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2011, 4:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/transliterating-between-english-and-arabic/603992/8 "2011-11-25T16:26:41Z")
Also, the letter that is pronounced in Arabic as a “j” sound is pronounced as a hard “g” in the Egyptian dialect. In Iraq you wouldn’t have a “g” sound like what’s in “gangsta”. (I do not speak Arabic but my wife is Egyptian.) ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2011, 4:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/transliterating-between-english-and-arabic/603992/9 "2011-11-25T16:59:03Z")
> [@Hail\_Ants](#): > > Ahhhhhh, ok, I have to ask, what do you mean ‘the vowels are not written’? How then do you know what they are? Is it that specific vowel sounds are always only preceded by the same specific consonants? They’re just not written. Arabic, like most Semitic languages, works from a word root, which consists of a set of consonants, with the intermediate vowels modified to indicate different version of the root. Usually, these roots consist of 3 consonants. When you’re reading, you infer the vowels based on the grammatical context. It would be like in English we wrote r-n to mean either run or ran, and you inferred the tense from the context. [This wikipedia article](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic#Literary_Arabic_2) isn’t that great, but it gives the gist of the idea. ---
**Author:** ![Lust4Life](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/ecc23a/32.png) [@Lust4Life](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lust4Life)\ **Post date:** [November 26, 2011, 10:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/transliterating-between-english-and-arabic/603992/10 "2011-11-26T10:24:56Z")
Makes you think of all the Westerners walking around with tatoos of items on chinese resteraunt menus, in the belief that it really says “hunting dragon” or somesuch. ---
**Author:** ![jjimm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ba8739/32.png) [@jjimm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jjimm)\ **Post date:** [November 26, 2011, 10:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/transliterating-between-english-and-arabic/603992/11 "2011-11-26T10:56:33Z")
And the story (that I witnessed personally so know to be true) of the girl who wanted “courage” tattooed in Thai, and just before the guy started inking he asked “are you sure you want a tattoo that says ‘curry’?” ---
**Author:** ![raskolnik](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e47c2d/32.png) [@raskolnik](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/raskolnik)\ **Post date:** [November 26, 2011, 1:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/transliterating-between-english-and-arabic/603992/12 "2011-11-26T13:51:21Z")
Arabic has NO p. Persian had to invent it, as thus Pashto, and Kurdish as well. Us arabs are stuck with blastic and airblanes. ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2011, 10:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/transliterating-between-english-and-arabic/603992/13 "2011-11-27T22:19:53Z")
> [@raskolnik](#): > > Arabic has NO p. Persian had to invent it, as thus Pashto, and Kurdish as well. Us arabs are stuck with blastic and airblanes. Can you get a B followed immediately by an H? That would approximate an aspirated B, which would be at least a little closer to a P. ---
**Author:** ![medicated](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7ab992/32.png) [@medicated](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/medicated)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2011, 10:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/transliterating-between-english-and-arabic/603992/14 "2011-11-27T22:26:07Z")
So if the vowels are not written but implied, wouldn’t that mean that it’s even harder to reconstruct (say) classical Arabic pronunciation than it would be to figure out how classical Latin was supposed to sound? All the vowel shifts over time would be utterly absent from the written record? ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2011, 5:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/transliterating-between-english-and-arabic/603992/15 "2011-11-28T05:57:34Z")
I was going to ask why do you assume there are vowel shifts - then I realized your first language is English and almost hurt myself with the facepalm. The other languages I’m familiar with (members of the Romance family) have no or almost no vowel variation throughout their geography, so it seems reasonable to assume that there is very little vowel variation throughout time as well. If Arabic also has very little vowel variation through geography, the same can be assumed for time. Also, English may be the most changeable of the major languages - I understand Arabic is much more stable than English is. ---
**Author:** ![AK84](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/85e7bf/32.png) [@AK84](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AK84)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2011, 6:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/transliterating-between-english-and-arabic/603992/16 "2011-11-28T06:10:19Z")
> [@raskolnik](#): > > Arabic has NO p. Persian had to invent it, as thus Pashto, and Kurdish as well. Us arabs are stuck with blastic and airblanes. And this Al Bakistani wants to bunch everyone who forgets it. Apparently Arabic did have a P sound at one boint err point. ---
**Author:** ![Farmer\_Jane](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/bbe5ce/32.png) [@Farmer\_Jane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Farmer_Jane)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2011, 6:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/transliterating-between-english-and-arabic/603992/17 "2011-11-28T06:21:27Z")
Since we got on the subject of vowels, I thought I’d share why I think this is reason number 2,040 that English is a pain in the ass: My son was reading Hebrew faster than English and he’s 7. He’s been learning English (writing) since he was 5. He’s had Hebrew class for almost a year and a half, but not really - I mean, the first year (K) he was just doing the alphabet. This year (1st), they do more vocab and reading and writing - including script. He’s been put in the Advanced Hebrew group because he just took off. His English reading is still behind, but I swear his Hebrew is helping his English at this point. His English is really improving, but for awhile, his Hebrew was A LOT faster. As he puts it, reading Hebrew makes sense but English doesn’t follow its own rules. 🙂 (True. Morphemes are easier to parse in Semitic languages.) Anyway, whoever puts ‘gangsta’ on his arm deserves a misspelling. ---
**Author:** ![medicated](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7ab992/32.png) [@medicated](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/medicated)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2011, 5:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/transliterating-between-english-and-arabic/603992/18 "2011-11-28T17:50:22Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > I was going to ask why do you assume there are vowel shifts - then I realized your first language is English and almost hurt myself with the facepalm. The other languages I’m familiar with (members of the Romance family) have no or almost no vowel variation throughout their geography, so it seems reasonable to assume that there is very little vowel variation throughout time as well. If Arabic also has very little vowel variation through geography, the same can be assumed for time. Also, English may be the most changeable of the major languages - I understand Arabic is much more stable than English is. Huh. A stupid assumption on my part, heh. It somehow never occurred to me that this was yet another thing that makes English and some other languages weird. Thanks 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2011, 6:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/transliterating-between-english-and-arabic/603992/19 "2011-11-28T18:00:12Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > I was going to ask why do you assume there are vowel shifts - then I realized your first language is English and almost hurt myself with the facepalm. The other languages I’m familiar with (members of the Romance family) have no or almost no vowel variation throughout their geography, so it seems reasonable to assume that there is very little vowel variation throughout time as well. Not really. [The wikipedia article on Romance Languages](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages) has an in-depth analysis of vowel variation over time in the Romance languages. ---
**Author:** ![Bhoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ce73a5/32.png) [@Bhoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bhoe)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2011, 10:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/transliterating-between-english-and-arabic/603992/20 "2011-11-28T22:38:28Z")
> [@raskolnik](#): > > Arabic has NO p. Persian had to invent it, as thus Pashto, and Kurdish as well. Us arabs are stuck with blastic and airblanes. You mean you Arab beoble? LOL Sorry, I heard an Arabic lady say “people” once and thought it was awesome. 🙂 [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/transliterating-between-english-and-arabic/603992.md?page=2)