It is not necessary to distinguish them by diacritics as they occur in different positions. There are two h letters: ہ (HEH GOAL) and ھ (HEH DOACHASHMEE).

The letter ں (NOON GHUNNA) occurs only at the end of the word and marks nasalization of the preceding vowel rather than a real consonant. We use the IPA symbol ˀ (MODIFIER LETTER GLOTTAL STOP). In transcription of Arabic, it is sometimes represented by superscript c. I do not attempt to map the special Semitic guttural consonant ayin to a Latin letter following pronunciation of a European language, as this sound is very peculiar to most Europeans. ğ is taken from Turkish and describes the sound that is often transcribed “gh” from Arabic (which we cannot use, again because of the aspirated gh). It would conflict with the aspirated kh of Urdu.

English-oriented transcriptions of Arabic often transcribe this sound as “kh”, a solution that we want to avoid. x represents (in accord with phonetic tradition) the same sound as Czech/German/Scottish “ch”. Of similar descent is the character ž the corresponding sound is sometimes represented as “zh” in English and corresponds to the French pronunciation of j. č and š are used in Baltic and Slavic languages (among others) to represent the sounds that are usually written “ch” or “sh”, respectively, in English. Some other notes: j is pronounced as in English, not as in Czech or German. Similarly, a cedilla below a letter distinguishes five other letters that occur in words of Arabic descent (ح, ص, ض, ط, ظ). A dot above a letter distinguishes two Arabic letters whose Urdu pronunciation is identical to other letters, from transliteration of those other letters (ث, ذ). I decided to represent the retroflex consonants (ٹ, ڈ, ڑ) by a dot below their dental or other counterparts, as is usual across the Indo-Aryan languages. Most of the consonants do not pose any serious problem. On the target side, no particular language was on my mind when modeling the pronunciation. Moreover, some of the original Arabic letters might prefer a different Latin representation if the mapping were motivated by Arabic, instead of Urdu pronunciation. Urdu uses a few characters that are not used in the original Arabic script. I provide a Perl script that implements the deterministic part of the transliteration and marks positions where human decision is needed. To help the reader with the pronunciation, I want to insert missing short vowels and disambiguate a few other cases. My goal is to reflect the original pronunciation as well as possible, while not violating the requirement that the original spelling be restorable. I use this transliteration scheme in papers on Urdu. transliteration into a Latin-based alphabet) of Urdu text. In this document I describe my approach to Romanization (i.e. As far as information is added but not removed, this is OK: the original spelling can still be reconstructed.

recover short vowels missing from a text in Arabic script). Transliteration could even disambiguate cases that are ambiguous in the source text (e.g. Occasionally, sequences of target letters (such as 'sh') can be used as one character if one can be reasonably sure that the individual letters cannot occur next to each other. Diacritical marks are used if the target script does not have enough characters. Ideally, transliteration is a letter-for-letter 1-1 mapping. In contrast, transliteration aims at preserving the original orthography in the first place. Also, a pronunciation-oriented mapping depends on the target language (in addition to target script) because different languages pronounce the same characters of the same script differently. However, if preserving pronunciation is the top priority, the mapping may become irreversible: silent letters will be omitted and various strings that are pronounced the same way will be mapped on the same target letter. To some extent, transcription is always guided by pronunciation (otherwise it would be encryption).

Urdu to english transliteration