A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

THE SYSTEM of phonetic transcription used in the following chapters has been chosen for reasons of accuracy and simplicity to represent spoken Egyptian Arabic in readable form for an English-speaking audience. The grammatical structure and phonological rules of colloquial Arabic and clas- sical Arabic differ in some aspects, and various transliteration systems have been used by scholars to better capture the nuances of colloquial Egyptian Arabic. Since I conducted my research primarily in colloquial Egyptian Ara- bic (outside of my use of written Arabic sources), I believe the system that I have adopted here best reflects those nuances. Ideally, a one-character symbol for each corresponding consonant sound in Egyptian colloquial Arabic should have been used, however, due to print- ing limitations, this was not possible and two-letter symbols have been used to represent the sounds of £ andglottal stop, because in spoken Egyptian Arabic these sounds are indistinguishable to the ear in most cases. In order to represent Egyptian colloquial phoneti- cally, i.e., the terms as they sound, it is necessary to include the glottal stop in this transcription system. The glottal stop is part of the sound system of Arabic, although Arabic orthography has no symbol to represent it. The symbols used for vowels are those adopted by Virginia Stevens and Maurice Salib in A Dictionary of the Spoken Arabic of Cairo (Cairo: Amer- ican University in Cairo Press, 1986) and El-Said Badawi and Martin Hinds in A Dictionary of Egyptian Arabic (Beirut: Librarie du Liban, 1986). In this transcription system, a consonant symbol is doubled to indicate that the length of that consonant is double that of its single counterpart. In the or- thography of the Arabic script, this doubling of consonant length would be represented by the use of a shadda. The situation of vowel length, however, is not so straightforward. While it would be accurate to say that doubled vowel symbols of aa, ii/ee, and uu/oo correspond to the Arabic script coun- terparts I, ^, and j, respectively, it is not always the case that single vowel symbols correspond to Arabic-script short vowel markers (fatHa, kasra, Dumma). For example, the word dallaala is transcribed as dallalaat in the plural, with the second vowel sound shortening in length due to a phonol- ogical rule of the Egyptian colloquial language. There is no corresponding "change" in the orthography, and thus it should not be inferred that the transcription dallalaat reflects anything more than the phonetic representa- tion of the word, as it exists in the Egyptian spoken language. Rather than use this transliteration system for proper names, place names, and frequently translated Arabic words, I have generally used their conventional spellings found in English-language sources. XX 'NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION* Consonants: Transliterated English Arabic O, *, and the glottal stop b t g H C X t d r J z * j s sh S u* D J° T Jo Z Jo c I gh I f q v3 k J l J m n 0r h 6 w J y ^ Vowels: The six vowel symbols used are: a approximately the same as a in English back or a in British class^ but never elongated e approximately the same as e between the vowel sounds in English tin and ten i approximately the same as / as in English win o approximately the same as o in standard English pop u approximately the same as u as in English put Vowel length: aa approximately the same sound but slightly longer than the a in English mad or palm ee approximately the same as in English mate ii approximately the same as in English seat oo approximately the same as in English note uu approximately the same as in English pool Avenues of Participation