Some languages have it worse than others: in Arabic, words like ṣabāḥ (“morning”) are written as SabaaH or, as in Arabic chat and texting, 9abaa7. ![]() ![]() Instead of tōkyō (“Tokyo”), which is easy on the eyes, you’ll see toukyou. Unfortunately, because of the difficulty of writing special characters like ō and ḥ and é on computers, people have had to come up with transliteration systems that look ugly but are easy to type. This matters because the point of transliteration is to represent pronunciation accurately. ![]() Without it, the transliteration would be inaccurate, because a short o and a long o would look the same. That ¯ on top of the o is called a macron, and sits over vowels to show that they’re long.
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