The Evolution of Ideas

By: Mustafa Umar

Arabic is radically different from English, even in its letters. This causes a difficulty in transliteration. For example: the word for prayer is written “salah” while the word for peace is written “salam”. Anyone familiar with Arabic would know that the “s” in salah and the “s” in salam represent two completely different letters. Therefore, it is better to use Unicode characters to clarify this for the reader. Another example is with the word “salam” and “salaam”. Some people write the word for peace with three a’s rather than two to clarify that there is a long vowel near the end. “Salam”, without the long vowel, is also an Arabic word which refers to a type of economic transaction.

Therefore, to make things easier for readers of Arabic transliteration, special Unicode characters should be used. The word for prayer is written “ṣalah” [with a dot under the “s”] to specify that the letter is a ص and not a س. The word peace is written “salām” to clarify that we are referring to prayer and not an economic transaction.

To enable this feature in MS Word, download this file: Diacritic.dot

By double clicking on the file, MS Word will open and you can start typing the Unicode characters. Hold Alt and press “a”. You will see an “ā” with a line over it appear. There are six letters in Arabic which resemble six others, therefore, they should be differentiated in transliteration. Long vowels can be written as “aa”, “ii”, or “uu”, but it is much neater to use a line on top of that letter instead. Here is a table of options:

You will find it a hassle to have to load the Diacritic.dot file every time you want to transliterate, especially if you do it frequently. Here is how you can permanently load the file every time you open MS Word under Windows 7:

1. Open “Windows Explorer”
2. Go to “C:”
3. Go to “Program Files”
4. Go to “Microsoft Office”
5. Go to “OfficeXX” [where XX stand for the version you have]
6. Go to “Startup”
7. Copy the “Diacritic.dot” file into this directory

Now every time you load Word, it will automatically load the Diacritic.dot file for you.

By: Mustafa Umar

Enabling Arabic Input in Windows 7
To be able to type in Arabic, do the following:
1. Click on the Start Menu
2. Click on Control Panel
3. Click on “Change keyboards or other input methods”
4. Click on “Change keyboards”
5. Click on “Add”
6. Choose “Arabic (Saudi Arabia)” [the country doesn’t matter too much]
7. Check “Arabic 101” and click “Ok”
8. Click “Ok” again to return to the “Region and Language” menu
9. Click “Ok” again to save changes
You will now see on the bottom right hand of your screen an icon which either says “EN” or “AR”. To change languages, you can click on it, select a different language, and start typing in that language. You can also toggle languages by holding Alt and pressing Shift [you will see the icon change].
On-Screen Keyboard
Now, you can either buy/make stickers with Arabic letters for your keyboard so you know what you are typing or you can use the on-screen keyboard built into Windows. To enable that keyboard:
1. Click on the Start Menu
2. Click on “All Programs”
3. Click on “Accessories”
4. Click on “Ease of Access”
5. Click on “On-Screen Keyboard”
6. Toggle the language to Arabic [by selecting “AR” or Alt-Shift] and the keyboard will automatically change as well
7. Click in the program where you want to type and click keys from the on-screen keyboard

To get certain Arabic programs, like the priceless Maktaba Shamila, to display correctly on Windows 7, you must change a setting on your system:
1. Click on the Start Menu
2. Click on Control Panel
3. Click on “Change keyboards or other input methods”
4. Click on the “Administrative” tab
5. Click “Change system locale”
6. Select the Arabic language that you chose for your keyboard, i.e. “Arabic (Saudi Arabia)”
7. Click “Ok”
8. Click “Ok” again
If you fail to do this, some programs that are supposed to be displayed in Arabic will display strange characters and question marks instead.