Page:Judeo-Arabic romanization table.pdf/4

{|cellspacing=0 ‫ סבתּ‬/sbt/ “Sabbath”
 * ‫ת‬,‫תּ‬
 * t
 * ‫ תּקול‬/tqwl/ “you say”
 * t
 * ‫ תּקול‬/tqwl/ “you say”

ʼl
 * &#8203;
 * colspan=3 |Ligature
 * ‫ﭏ‬
 * initial:
 * ‫ﭏ‬
 * initial:
 * initial:
 * ‫ ﭏ‬/ʼl/ “the”

‫ מﭏ‬/mʼl/ “property”
 * }

Notes

1. The ALA/LC system of romanization for Judeo-Arabic provides a one-to-one representation of the consonants in the text, including “alif” (‫‬א), "y" (י) and "w" (ו) which sometimes represent long vowels and sometimes consonants.

2. Judeo-Arabic texts are produced both with and without vocalization. Because of the multiglossic nature of Judeo-Arabic and its texts, when the short vowels are not represented in the text, there no way to treat them that would be useful and reliable across all dialects. It is also not practical for catalogers to attempt to provide vowels matching those of Standard Arabic, because of the frequent difficulty of matching Judeo-Arabic lexical items to equivalent Standard Arabic forms. Even if there were an attempt to provide a complete “normalization” of Judeo-Arabic morphology for all the parts of speech, a kind of artificial “cataloging dialect,” neither catalogers nor patrons could be expected to study it in enough depth to make it useful, nor could it agree in all points with any actual dialect. 1/31/2011