The Buckwalter Transliteration
The Buckwalter Transliteration (chart) of Modern
Standard Arabic orthography was developed by lexicographer Tim Buckwalter
for practical storage, display and email transmission of Arabic text in
environments where the display of genuine Arabic characters is not possible
or convenient. Text coded in ASMO449 or ISO-8859-6 can be converted
trivially and unambiguously into the Buckwalter transliteration; and except
for the rarely used dagger 'alif and waSla-on-'alif, which are missing from ASMO449
and ISO-8859-6, the reverse mapping is equally straightforward. Buckwalter
transliteration can be trivially converted to and from UNICODE, which
contains the extra characters.
The Xerox Java applets that display Arabic
script use UNICODE characters internally.
The Buckwalter System is a true or strict orthographical transliteration,
as opposed to the majority of "transcription" romanizations of Arabic that
are intended to convey phonological or morphophonological information; it
has the advantages of being complete, typable and displayable on common
ascii terminals and printers. Because the Roman character equivalents are
chosen to be reasonably mnemonic, Arabists can learn to read and write
Buckwalter texts with little difficulty.
Prof. Dr. Klaus Lagally of the University of Stuttgart has also kindly
written a "buck.sty" style file for his excellent ArabTeX
system, allowing TeX and LaTeX users to specify Arabic
strings in their documents using the Buckwalter transliteration. (ArabTeX
is available by FTP from "ftp.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de" (129.69.211.2).
The package resides in "/pub/arabtex/"; see also the file "arabtex.htm".)
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Ken.Beesley@xrce.xerox.com
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