I have a couple of questions about why Arabic words are currently transliterated the way they are.

1) Why is it now correct to spell "Iraq" with a q rather than a k as in "Irak"? Why transiterate the word with a q, when a "k" serves the same purpose and makes more sense for English readers?

2) Why is "Koran" now properly spelled "Qur'an"? What's with the "Qu" being pronounced like a K (again, why violate common English spelling rules when transliterating a word that could be transliterated without such confusing violations)?

Also, why the apostrophe? What purpose does the apostrophe serve except to make it obvious that this is a foreign word? Does it represent a sound?

I don't know about Arabic, but Hebrew (both are Semitic languages) has several letters pronounced as a hard "k" sound and several with a guttoral ch sound (sort of like the "j" in Spanish), sometimes mistakenly pronounced as a soft "h", an English "ch" or English "ck". (An example of this would be the word "Hannakuh", sometimes spelled "Channakuh". The correct pronunciation is with a guttoral, not h or ch.)

kaf (usually spelled in English as a K)
koof (usually spelled as a q)
chet/het (guttoral "j" sound)
chaf/haf (ditto)

The word for "Iraq" probably ends with the Arabic equivalent of the Hebrew koof.

I think in your second question, the apostraphe is meant to indicate which syllable is stressed.

That makes a lot of sense. Thanks, Mahal.

The apostrophe in Qu'ran and the like represents the Arabic sound alif, which, like Hebrew alef (À), is a consonant known as a glottal stop. English doesn't use this sound to distinguish meanings, but it occurs frequently in speech anyway, where it usually goes by unobserved. The Cockney dialect uses it regulary to replace "t" in words like "bottle": [bo'le].

The symbol q is the standard IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) symbol for a so-called uvular stop. This is not a fricative, like the inital sound in "Channakuh," as mahal suggests above, but a true stop, meaning that the airflow is for a brief period completely interrupted. The closest thing to it in English is indeed the stop [k], as in "cool." In Arabic, the closure that produces the stop is even farther back toward the pharyngeal wall, thus making it sound indeed "gutteral" to the speaker of English. The latter is a term which
linguists would prefer not to use, though, since it has no clear meaning.

Interesting! Thanks, Maiku.

If the apostrophe is intended to stand in for a letter (or letters), what's missing? Are you saying that it should actually be something like:

Qu(ah)ran

quote:

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Originally posted by mahal:
If the apostrophe is intended to stand in for a letter (or letters), what's missing? Are you saying that it should actually be something like:

Qu(ah)ran

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The apostrophe in Qur'an (which I misspelled above) is a letter, mahal, and it doesn't represent anything "missing." It represents the glottal stop consonant, as I said, and since this is not used to distinguish words in English (it is not phonemic in English, to use the appropriate jargon), nor any other major Western language, its presence in Arabic words was simply ignored in previous transliterations like Koran. (As was the distinction, in Arabic, between the stops [k] and [q], which they, but not us, regard as quite different.)