The Standard Arabic Technical Transliteration System, commonly referred to by its acronym SATTS, is a system for writing and transmitting Arabic language text using the one-for-one substitution of ASCII-range characters for the letters of the Arabic alphabet. Unlike more common systems for transliterating Arabic, SATTS does not provide the reader with any more phonetic information than standard Arabic orthography does; that is, it provides the bare Arabic alphabetic spelling with no notation of short vowels, doubled consonants, etc. In other words, it is intended as a transliteration tool for Arabic linguists, and is of limited use to those who do not know Arabic.
SATTS, a legacy of Morse and teleprinter systems (see "Background," below), has historically been employed by military and communications elements of Western countries for handling Arabic text without the need for native fonts or special software. Although its use has decreased in recent years with the demise of Morse code and the obsolescence of the teleprinter, and with the increased availability of native-font software, it is still used for the quick and handy platform-independent recording and transmission of Arabic terms and text.
Format
SATTS employs all the Latin alphabetic letters except P, plus four punctuation marks, for a total of 29 symbols (all the letters of the Arabic alphabet, plus the glottal-stop symbol hamzah).
In some words, lām 'alif was sent as a single character •—••••— or LA as a single character. The symbol for the glottal stop hamzah (ء) is written following its seat, if it has one. It is omitted when it occurs with an initial 'alif. RIEIS رئيس MAEDB? مأدبة MSWEWL مسؤول BDE بدء AHMD أحمد ASLAM إسلام
Sample text
Native orthography
SATTS transliteration
جامعة الدول العربية هي منظمة تضم دولا في الشرق الأوسط وأفريقيا
The chief deficiencies of SATTS are that it does not distinguish between hā' (ه) and tā' marbūţah (ة), or between final yā' (ي) and 'alif maksūrah (ى), and it cannot depict an 'alif maddah ( آ ). SATTS can also not distinguish between a final seated hamza and a final independent hamza, if the word ends in "AE", "IE", or "WE".
Background
The Latin alphabetic letter employed for each Arabic letter in the SATTS system is its Morse-code equivalent. For example, Morse code for the Arabic letter ţā' (ط) is • • — (dit-dit-dah). That same Morse code sequence represents the letter U in the Latin alphabet. Hence the SATTS equivalent for ţā' is U.
In the Morse-code era, when Arabic language Morse signals were copied down by non-Arab code clerks, the text came out in SATTS. Text in SATTS was also automatically produced when teleprinters reproduced Arabic text, if the technician had failed to replace the printer's Latin-character pallet with an Arabic-character one.
The Arabic alphabet, or Arabic abjad, is the Arabic script as it is codified for writing Arabic. It is written from right to left in a cursive style and includes 28 letters. Most letters have contextual letterforms.
A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter or basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek διακριτικός, from διακρίνω. The word diacritic is primarily a noun, though it is sometimes used as an adjective, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritics, such as the acute ( ´ ) and grave ( ` ), are often called accents. Diacritics may appear above or below a letter or in some other position such as within the letter or between two letters.
Matres lectionis are consonants that are used to indicate a vowel, primarily in the writing down of Semitic languages such as Arabic, Hebrew and Syriac. The letters that do this in Hebrew are alephא, heה, wawו and yodי, and in Arabic, the matres lectionis are ʾalifا, wāwو and yāʾي. The 'yod and waw in particular are more often vowels than they are consonants.
The Ugaritic writing system is a cuneiform abjad used from around either the fifteenth century BCE or 1300 BCE for Ugaritic, an extinct Northwest Semitic language, and discovered in Ugarit, Syria, in 1928. It has 30 letters. Other languages were occasionally written in the Ugaritic script in the area around Ugarit, although not elsewhere.
The Arabic script has numerous diacritics, including i'jam, consonant pointing, and tashkil, supplementary diacritics. The latter include the ḥarakāt (حَرَكَات) vowel marks - singular: ḥarakah (حَرَكَة).
DIN 31635 is a Deutsches Institut für Normung (DIN) standard for the transliteration of the Arabic alphabet adopted in 1982. It is based on the rules of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (DMG) as modified by the International Orientalist Congress 1935 in Rome. The most important differences from English-based systems were doing away with j, because it stood for in the English-speaking world and for in the German-speaking world and the entire absence of digraphs like th, dh, kh, gh, sh. Its acceptance relies less on its official status than on its elegance and the Geschichte der arabischen Literatur manuscript catalogue of Carl Brockelmann and the dictionary of Hans Wehr. Today it is used in most German-language publications of Arabic and Islamic studies.
Yodh is the tenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Yōd , Hebrew Yōd י, Aramaic Yodh , Syriac Yōḏ ܝ, and Arabic Yāʾ ي. Its sound value is in all languages for which it is used; in many languages, it also serves as a long vowel, representing.
Jaꞑalif, Yangalif or Yañalif, is the first Latin alphabet used during the latinisation in the Soviet Union in the 1930s for the Turkic languages. It replaced the Yaña imlâ Arabic script-based alphabet in 1928, and was replaced by the Cyrillic alphabet in 1938-1940. Several former Soviet states in Central Asia switched back to Latin script, with slight modifications to the original Jaꞑalif.
Ayin is the sixteenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ʿayin, Hebrew ʿayinע, Aramaic ʿē, Syriac ʿē ܥ, and Arabic ʿayn ع.
Aleph is the first letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ʾālep 𐤀, Hebrew ʾālef א, Aramaic ʾālap 𐡀, Syriac ʾālap̄ ܐ, and Arabic alif ا. It also appears as South Arabian 𐩱, and Ge'ez ʾälef አ.
The romanization of Arabic refers to the standard norms for rendering written and spoken Arabic in the Latin script in one of various systematic ways. Romanized Arabic is used for a number of different purposes, among them transcription of names and titles, cataloging Arabic language works, language education when used moreover or alongside the Arabic script, and representation of the language in scientific publications by linguists. These formal systems, which often make use of diacritics and non-standard Latin characters and are used in academic settings or for the benefit of non-speakers, contrast with informal means of written communication used by speakers such as the Latin-based Arabic chat alphabet.
The Arabic chat alphabet, Arabizi, Franco-Arabic, Arabish, Araby, and Mu'arrab (معرب), refer to the Romanized alphabets for informal Arabic dialects in which Arabic script is transcribed or encoded into a combination of Latin script and Arabic numerals. These informal chat alphabets were originally used primarily by youth in the Arab world in very informal settings—especially for communicating over the Internet or for sending messages via cellular phones—though use is not necessarily restricted by age anymore and these chat alphabets have been used in other media such as advertising.
The Hans Wehr transliteration system is a system for transliteration of the Arabic alphabet into the Latin alphabet used in the Hans Wehr dictionary. The system was modified somewhat in the English editions. It is printed in lowercase italics. It marks some consonants using diacritics rather than digraphs, and writes long vowels with macrons.
The Buckwalter Arabic transliteration was developed as part of the ALPNET Arabic Project being run by Dr. Ken Beesley in 1988.
Rasm is an Arabic writing script often used in the early centuries of Classical Arabic literature. Essentially it is the same as today's Arabic script except for the big difference that dots and dashes are omitted. In rasm, the five distinct letters ـبـ ـتـ ـثـ ـنـ ـيـ are indistinguishable because all the dots are omitted. It is also known as Arabic skeleton script.
The Urdu alphabet, is the right-to-left alphabet used for the Urdu language. It is a modification of the Persian alphabet, which is itself a derivative of the Arabic alphabet. The Urdu alphabet has up to 39 or 40 distinct letters with no distinct letter cases and is typically written in the calligraphic Nastaʿlīq script, whereas Arabic is more commonly written in the Naskh style.
Hamza (ء) is a letter in the Arabic alphabet, representing the glottal stop. Hamza is not one of the 28 "full" letters and owes its existence to historical inconsistencies in the standard writing system. It is derived from the Arabic letter ʿAyn (ع). In the Phoenician and Aramaic alphabets, from which the Arabic alphabet is descended, the glottal stop was expressed by alif (𐤀), continued by Alif ( ا ) in the Arabic alphabet. However, Alif was used to express both a glottal stop and also a long vowel. In order to indicate that a glottal stop is used, and not a mere vowel, it was added to Alif diacritically. In modern orthography, hamza may also appear on the line, under certain circumstances as though it were a full letter, independent of an Alif.
A set of rules for the romanization of Arabic that is highly phonetic, almost one-to-one, and uses only two special characters, namely the hyphen and the apostrophe as modifiers. This standard also includes rules for diacritization, including tanwiin.
The Pashto alphabet is transliterated vis-à-vis Perso-Arabic scriptural denotation with additional glyphs added to accommodate phonemes used in Pashto.
There are three writing systems for Saraiki, but very few of the language's speakers, even those who are literate in other languages, are able to read or write Saraiki in any writing system.
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