My Transcription

My land, Iran, is not the only one who has been subject to Arab conquest. Persian language has been subject to a substantial Arab invasion, resulting in many borrowings and a Semitic system of writing that doesn’t suit this Indo-European language.

Persian does not have the Arab velar and emphatic consonants, and has four consonants that the Arabs haven’t heard of. In addition, while Arabic is often vocalize, Persian rarely is, resulting in unclear readings. E.g. مهر can be either mehr, the name of a god and a month, as well as “love” and “sun”, or mohr – a seal (not the marine mamal, the thing you seal or sign things with), or mahr, an Arabic word that defies translation to English, but here’s its Wikipedia entry.

A worse phenomenon caused by this confusing writing system, is that there are some words that even the native speakers themselves don’t know how to pronounce. Therefore, for the word نمایش, there exist the historically accurate pronunciation nemajesch, alongside næmajesch, which is quite common, and nomajesch – an unhistorical hyper-correction by older educated people.

For all these reasons, I think a latin transcription would be much more suitable for my language than an Arabic one. There’s Penglish used on the web, but it has no standard and is often not precise.

Introducing – my transliteration, in Persian alphabetical order. I’ve based it in a few European languages.

aleph (ا) as a glottal stop is not marked at all, because it is never pronounced as such.

Aleph (ا) as a vowel is rendered as a, as opposed to the front (historically short) a vowel, which is represented as æ.

ب = b

پ = p

ت = t

ث = s (this Arabic letter is homophonous in Persian with س and ص)

ج = dj, as in French (for Foreign words).

چ = cz, as in Polish.

ح = h (this Arabic letter is homophonous in Persian with هـ)

خ = ch, as in Polish and German.

The historical cluster xw-, which is written in today’s Persian as خو but pronounced only ch– (e.g. Middle Persian xwāhar “sister”, New Persian خواهر, pronounced like chahær), is written as qu-, thus the above word for “sister” would be written quahær.

د = d

ذ = z (this Arabic letter is homophonous in Persian with ز، ض and ظ)

ر = r

ز = z (this letter is homophonous in Persian with Arabic ذ، ض and ظ)

ژ = cjI think this one is my own innovation.

س = s

ش = sch, as in German.

ص = s

ض = z

ط = t

ظ = z

ع – this Arabic letter is pronounced as a glottal stop in literary Persian, but omitted altogether in the spoken language. It therefore has no representation.

غ = gh, as in English transcriptions of words containing this phoneme, e.g. Maghreb (this letter is homophonous in Persian with ق)

ف = f

ق = gh

ک = k

گ = g

ل = l

م = m

ن = n

و as a consonant = v

و as a (historically long) vowel = u, as part of a diphthong = ow. The historically short back vowel ( ـُ) is transcribed o.

هـ =  h

ی as a consonant = j

ی as a (historically long) vowel = i, as part of a diphthong = ej. The historically short front vowel (ـِ) is transcribed e.

All my texts, pictures and graphics are licensed cc-by-nc-sa. My transliteration is for any use with no restrictions, but I would appreciate credit and a link anyway.

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