Romanization of Persian

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Persian alphabet
ﺍ ﺏ پ ﺕ ﺙ ﺝ چ
ﺡ ﺥ ﺩ ﺫ ﺭ ﺯ ژ
ﺱ ﺵ ﺹ ﺽ ﻁ ﻅ
ﻉ ﻍ ﻑ ﻕ ک گ
ﻝ ﻡ ﻥ ﻭ هـ ی
History · Transliteration Diacritics · Hamza ء Numerals · Numeration

1 Transliteration
2 Transcription
- 2.1 Comparison of proposed Persian and neighboring Latin-based scripts
3 Romanization schemes
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Transliteration

Transliteration (in the strict sense) attempts to be a complete representation of the original writing, so that an informed reader should be able to reconstruct the original spelling of unknown transliterated words. Transliterations of Persian are used to represent individual Persian words or short quotations, in scholarly texts in English or other languages that do not use the Arabic alphabet.

A transliteration will still have separate representations for different consonants of the Persian alphabet that are pronounced identically in Persian. Therefore transliterations of Persian are often based on transliterations of Arabic. Persian-alphabet vowel representation is also complex, and transliterations are based on the written form.

Transliterations commonly used in the English-speaking world include BGN/PCGN romanization and ALA-LC Romanization.

Non-academic English-language quotation of Persian words usually uses a simplification of one of the strict transliteration schemes (typically omitting diacritical marks) and/or unsystematic choices of spellings meant to guide English speakers using English spelling rules towards an approximation of the Persian sounds.

[edit] Transcription

Transcriptions of Persian attempt to straightforwardly represent Persian phonology in the Roman alphabet, without requiring a close or reversible correspondence with the Perso-Arabic script, and also without requiring a close correspondence to English-language phonetic values of Roman letters; for example, letters such as X, Q, C may be reused for Persian-language phonemes that are not present in English phonology or do not have a consistent or single-letter English spelling.

Proposed Roman-alphabet scripts intended to be a primary representation of Persian, for use by Persian speakers as an alternative to the Perso-Arabic script, fall into this category. Some of these proposed scripts are described at Omniglot.

[edit] Comparison of proposed Persian and neighboring Latin-based scripts

IPA	Pk	UP	EF	tm	az	tk	ASCII^[1]	English
/æ/	A a			Ä ä	Ə ə	E e ^[2]	a	cat
/ɒː/	Á á	Â â	Ã ã	A a ^[3]			aa	father^[4]
/ʃ/	Sc sc	Š š		Ş ş			sh	ship
/ʒ/	Zc zc	Ž ž			J j		zh^[5]	vision
/ʧ/	C c^[6]			Ç ç			ch	church
/ʤ/	J j				C c		j	judge
/ɣ/^[7]	Q q^[8]				Ğ ğ		gh^[5]	none
/χ/	X x^[9]				X x		kh^[5]	none
/ʔ/	^[10]	'					' ^[5]	uh-oh

^ E.g. when commenting in weblogs or when using cellphones to send SMS. See Arabic Chat Alphabet for a similar example.
^ In Turkish, actually close-mid front unrounded vowel
^ Actually open back unrounded vowel
^ Similar to /ɑː/ of Received Pronunciation and /ɑ/ of General American plus additional roundedness, but not like the front /aː/ of Australian English.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Not used for this sound in native English words, but standard in transliterations of foreign languages such as ALA-LC Romanization
^ Same value as in National Library at Kolkata romanization and other transliterations of Indic scripts, as well as in Malay/Indonesian
^ When /ɣ/ occurs at the beginning of a word, it is realized as a voiced uvular plosive ɢ
^ Different sound than Arabic qāf, but both qaf and ghayn in Arabic words are pronounced with this sound in Persian
^ Cyrillic kha and Azeri Roman x look the same and are used for the slightly different voiceless velar fricative sound
^ Diacritic mark over following vowel added or changed

One common theme is that in transcriptions of Persian, the unmarked letter a is used for the front vowel /æ/, while accented or doubled versions of the letter are used for the back vowel /ɒː/; this is opposite to the conventions in Latin alphabets of Turkic languages, although similar to some romanizations of Arabic.

[edit] Romanization schemes

[edit] UniPers

UniPers, also called Pârsiye Jahâni (literally: global Persian) by its creators, is a proposed Latin-based alphabet for the Persian language. The system combines the basic Latin alphabet plus a few modified letters (Â/â, Š/š, Ž/ž, and an apostrophe).

The creators of the system have mentioned that they have the following criteria for their design of the system: serving the Persian language and no other, only using the Latin script, simplicity and ease of use by using a minimal number of diacritical letters and rules, one-to-one correspondence between the sound values of the language and the letters in the system (which may be relaxed in case of š and ž), and conformance with standard pronunciation of the language.^[1]

A a	Â â	B b	C c	D d	E e	F f	G g	H h	I i
/æ/	/ɑː/	/b/	/ʧ/	/d/	/e/	/f/	/ɡ/	/h/	/i/
J j	K k	L l	M m	N n	O o	P p	Q q	R r	S s
/dʒ/	/k/	/l/	/m/	/n/	/o/	/p/	/ɣ/	/ɾ/	/s/
Š š	T t	U u	V v	W w	X x	Y y	Z z	Ž ž	'
/ʃ/	/t/	/u/	/v/	/w/	/χ/	/j/	/z/	/ʒ/	/ʔ/

[edit] ASCII Internet romanizations

This section may contain original research or unverified claims.
Please improve the article by adding references. See the talk page for details. (April 2008)

It is common to write Persian language with only English letters especially when commenting in weblogs or when using cellphones to send SMS. One form of such writing is as below

A a	AA aa	B b	CH ch	D d	E e	F f	G g	H h	I i
/æ/	/ɑː/	/b/	/ʧ/	/d/	/e/	/f/	/ɡ/	/h/	/i/
J j	K k	L l	M m	N n	O o	P p	GH gh	R r	S s
/dʒ/	/k/	/l/	/m/	/n/	/o/	/p/	/ɣ/	/ɾ/	/s/
SH sh	T t	U u	V v	W w	KH kh	Y y	Z z	ZH zh	'
/ʃ/	/t/	/u/	/v/	/w/	/χ/	/j/	/z/	/ʒ/	/ʔ/

[edit] Tajik latin alphabet

Main article: Tajik alphabet

The Tajik language is closely related to Persian. It was written in Tajik SSR in a standardized Latin script from 1926 until late 1930s, when the script was officially changed to Cyrillic. However, Tajik phonology differs slightly from that of Persian in Iran; see Persian phonology#Historical shifts.