it sees the double quotes. Originally, even < > & were not used either especially < > which are French borrowed quote marks because they are occasionally used in Arabic text. These were added later as a necessity. Their XML safe versions keep with the mnemonic device devised (and discussed below) in that I O W correspond (if imprecisely) to each of the sounds made. Key concepts in development of the table There were three key concepts used the transliteration schema: The first was that each Arabic letter (sound) can only correspond to one English language character. Some Arabic letters produce a sound that corresponds to 2 English letters when written. Therefore, a single letter or common symbol would have to be used for them. The second concept was to use the familiar if possible. If an Arabic letter had always been associated with the letter “s” in English, for example, then it would be easier to remember if it could be kept that way. The third key concept was that the table had to be fully, easily mnemonic. Therefore, every single item correlates in the following order of preference a) to the sound of the Arabic letter, or b) to a physical aspect of the original Arabic letter or, c) to the name it is called. Mechanics Lower case letters were used in preference. However, when there are multiple Arabic letters that have a similar sounds then for more open sounds the lower case letter was used and for more close/restricted sounds an upper case letter was used. For example, in Arabic there are 2 letters similar to the in English sound. The plain sound was given a small “d” and the emphatic sound was assigned an upper case “D”. In other words, an upper case letter indicates that the letter is similar to a lower case letter – but has a qualitative difference in some way. Buckwalter transliteration table hamza lone hamza: ' hamza on alif: > hamza below alif: < hamza on wa: & hamza on ya: } alif madda on alif: | alif al-wasla: { dagger alif: ` alif maqsura: Y harakat fatha: a damma: u kasra: i fathatayn: F dammatayn: N kasratayn K shadda: ~ sukun: o ta marbouta: p tatwil: _ Mnemonics The original ALPNET team quickly adopted this schema. Even though Beesley had no background in Arabic he was quickly able to understand