Editing Arabic (section)

=== Romanization ===
{{Main|Romanization of Arabic}}There are a number of different standards for the [[romanization of Arabic]], i.e. methods of accurately and efficiently representing Arabic with the Latin script. There are various conflicting motivations involved, which leads to multiple systems. Some are interested in [[transliteration]], i.e. representing the ''spelling'' of Arabic, while others focus on [[Phonetic transcription|transcription]], i.e. representing the ''pronunciation'' of Arabic. (They differ in that, for example, the same letter {{lang|ar|[[ي]]}} is used to represent both a consonant, as in "'''y'''ou" or "'''y'''et", and a vowel, as in "m'''e'''" or "'''ea'''t".)

Some systems, e.g. for scholarly use, are intended to accurately and unambiguously represent the phonemes of Arabic, generally making the phonetics more explicit than the original word in the Arabic script. These systems are heavily reliant on [[diacritic]]al marks such as "š" for the sound equivalently written ''sh'' in English. Other systems (e.g. the [[Bahá'í orthography]]) are intended to help readers who are neither Arabic speakers nor linguists with intuitive pronunciation of Arabic names and phrases.{{citation needed|date=November 2019}}

These less "scientific" systems tend to avoid [[diacritics]] and use [[digraph (orthography)|digraphs]] (like ''sh'' and ''kh''). These are usually simpler to read, but sacrifice the definiteness of the scientific systems, and may lead to ambiguities, e.g. whether to interpret ''sh'' as a single sound, as in ''gash'', or a combination of two sounds, as in ''gashouse''. The [[ALA-LC]] romanization solves this problem by separating the two sounds with a [[Prime (symbol)|prime]] symbol ( ′ ); e.g., ''as′hal'' 'easier'.

During the last few decades and especially since the 1990s, Western-invented text communication technologies have become prevalent in the Arab world, such as [[personal computer]]s, the [[World Wide Web]], [[email]], [[bulletin board system]]s, [[Internet Relay Chat|IRC]], [[instant messaging]] and [[mobile phone text messaging]]. Most of these technologies originally had the ability to communicate using the Latin script only, and some of them still do not have the Arabic script as an optional feature. As a result, Arabic speaking users communicated in these technologies by transliterating the Arabic text using the Latin script.

To handle those Arabic letters that cannot be accurately represented using the Latin script, numerals and other characters were appropriated. For example, the numeral "3" may be used to represent the Arabic letter {{angle bracket|{{lang|ar|ع}}}}. There is no universal name for this type of transliteration, but some have named it [[Arabic Chat Alphabet]] or IM Arabic. Other systems of transliteration exist, such as using dots or capitalization to represent the "emphatic" counterparts of certain consonants. For instance, using capitalization, the letter {{angle bracket|{{lang|ar|د}}}}, may be represented by '''d'''. Its emphatic counterpart, {{angle bracket|{{lang|ar|ض}}}}, may be written as '''D'''.