Talk:Bahá'í orthography

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[edit] Correct transliteration

Take a look at Arabic transliteration. The system that most resembles Shoghi Effendi's method of transliterating is the ALA-LC, which is the Library of Congress standard. I have been itching to fix up the various transliterations on various Baha'i pages that currently use a variety of symbols for transliterating the 'hamza' and 'ayn' letters. I would like to use the standard found on that page, with hamza transliterating as ’, and ayn transliterating as ʻ, regardless of where it appears in the word. There are also dots that need to be put under several of the H, S, D, and T's.

Any comments? Cuñado - Talk 20:03, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

The transliteration used by Shoghi Effendi does not follow any of the ones on that page since none of them use á or í (intead they use ā ), so I would say to 'not use the the ALA-LC scheme, but just follow the Baha'i form. Also, I'm not for the use of the dots under the use of the words, since the font used by Wikipedia make it unduly hard to read the word. -- Jeff3000 21:13, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

The only difference I think is that they use a dash over long vowels, where Shoghi Effendi used a tick mark. Consider the example of Abdu'l-Baha. A correct transliteration would give all of the information that is in the Arabic. So the correct transliteration needs to reflect the 'ayn' at the beginning, and the hamza at the beginning of "al-Baha", and the hamza at the end of Baha. The official site, www.bahai.org uses two different ways of writing this: `Abdu'l-Bahá [1] and 'Abdu'l-Bahá [2], and reference.bahai.org uses a different one: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá [3], and none of them carry a marker for the hamza at the end of "al-Baha". For convenience, most Baha'i wiki pages are currently using the apostrophe ', for the hamza mark, but the 'ain' marker is different on different pages. I'll remove my previous suggestions, which aren't on the list of easy-to-click-on characters underneath the edit window, and suggest the reference.bahai.org ticks, which are on the wiki clickable characters, using the ‘ for ayn, and the ’ for hamza. This is actually the same standard as most of the transliterations, if you look close.

This comes to another issue. I think there should be two levels of transliteration on these pages, one being the "correct" version, with dots and acute accents, used in the opening sentence, followed by the original Arabic text when possible. After that there should be a "lazy" transliteration, without dots, using apostrophes instead of acutes, but still using accents over long vowels. The lazy version should be used in page titles. See Fatima Zahra for an example of what I mean. It's how most of the Islamic pages are done, except they don't use accents in titles. Cuñado

- Talk 21:45, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

OK I spoke too soon, I did more reading into it, and the grave accent ` is on the keyboard, so it makes sense to use that as the 'ayin', and the apostrophe as the hamza, so `Abdu'l-Bahá would be the correct version, which is how it is already. Cuñado

- Talk 22:13, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

The specific apostrophe/dashes/etc can be changed to whatever is common, but ` and ' are on the keyboard (as you stated) and ‘ and ’ are not, so it makes it even harder to type out Bahá'í, with almost no visible diffference. So I'm in favour of keeping the ` and ' In other thoughts, I know that I've been placing the diacretics on most Baha'i words, but I would be in favour of removing all diacretics as well, if there is consensus. -- Jeff3000 23:58, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

I think removing diacritics from the article titles would be a great idea. I would approve of removing all diacritics, as long as they are mentioned correctly, at least once, in the beginning of an article (like the Fatima Zahra example). Cuñado

- Talk 01:47, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

I really support having the diacritics used rigorously in the articles. As concerns the page-titles, I'm not very savvy on what characters may or may not be problematic for technical restrications reasons, so that's a totally different issue. The entire reason for having a transliteration standard is to ensure uniformity among Latin-alphabet-using Bahá'í communities. The fact that many publications and websites are less rigorous is mostly due to habit from when such diacritics were either impossible or incredibly hard to render uniformly across multiple platforms. With the onset of Unicode and standardized coding schemes, it would seem contrary to the intent of the Guardian's transliteration standard and Wikipedia's quest for academic rigor to ignore it. When I search for the original Arabic or Persian script form of a given word, name, or title (among other reasons, to include it in a Wikipedia article (e.g. Huqúqu'lláh)), having a precise transliteration to start from gives me a lot of direction, and makes finding and recognizing the original a lot easier. It seems to me that including the diacritics helps at least a minority of people (i.a. linguists, etc.), and doesn't really make it harder for those who aren't interested. Of course, I may be wrong, and I'll support whatever consensus is reached. Keldan 03:36, 18 March 2006 (UTC)