Glottal stop

Hi, I don't understand this edit. It seems that you replaced all glottal stops transliterated with ʾ by ʔ. However, according to this page the symbol "ʔ" is "dispreferred". What's the reason? Best,

Judging by the edit summary, perhaps confusion between ʾ (U+02BE, MODIFIER LETTER RIGHT HALF RING, which is used to represent the glottal stop) and ˈ (U+02C8; MODIFIER LETTER VERTICAL LINE, which is used in IPA to represent the primary stress). Without magnification, it's hard to tell if the gnat's eyebrow is bent or straight...

Hi,

From what I understand, the editor used U+02BE, as recommend by Wiktionary's guidelines, to represent a glottal stop (and not primary stress), and then Fenakhay replaced this character by ʔ, the "dispreferred alternative" for the glottal stop, according to Wiktionary's guidelines again.

I'm not a big fan of U+02BE because as you say it can be hard to distinguish from primary stress or from the ع. However, as a user, when I see Fenakhay's edit (and the edit summary—"What's wrong with this guy"—that I find at least surprising if not insulting, disrespectful, and offensive, unless I didn't understand something...), I wonder:

• Should users respect these guidelines (WT:AAR)?
• Do these guidelines apply to all Arabic dialects/varieties/languages? WT:AAR mentions dialects 8 times and colloquial 3 times and even has a section "How to add regional pronunciations" saying: "The template {{temp|arabic-dialect-pronunciation}} can be used to display pronunciations in the modern dialects of Arabic. See for example {{lang|ar|[[قابلة]]}}." So I think that WT:AAR's authors assume it applies to all Arabic varieties.
• What is the romanization scheme used by Fenakhay (I'll call it below, "Fenakhay's romanization" to simplify), can other users find it somewhere in order to understand it and/or apply it in their own contributions?
• On which scholarly sources is this romanization based? Or is it an original work from one or several Wiktionary contributors? Sources I found for Levantine don't seem to follow Fenakhay's romanization. But the community can choose another option, that's fine.
• Was there a debate among the community to use "Fenakhay's romanization" for Levantine Arabic instead of WT:AAR? If yes, where?
• If there was such a debate, shouldn't we add to WT:AAR that this policy doesn't apply to Levantine Arabic and link to Wiktionary's Levantine Arabic romanization guidelines?

Because we want all Levantine entries (South and North) to use a common romanization, and because we want users (both readers and contributors) to understand Wiktionary's romanization guidelines, I think these questions are important and should be answered.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

I don't see an issue in confusing the half ring with the IPA stress sign, as it's clear from the context, one is used in romanization, the other one used in IPA. However both half ring signs are hard to distinguish as they are so tiny. Even ʔ and ʕ can be easily confused by those, who don't know IPA well, as they look the same but mirrored. For that reason I kept the half ring for the glottal stop and used ʕ for ع in the South Levantine entries I added.

I like ʔ because, in addition to being identical to IPA, it looks like 2, commonly used in Arabizi for hamza. Yes, the big issue with ʕ is that it's hard to distinguish from ʔ and even more from the Arabic question mark ؟ when we romanize whole sentences in examples...

Fena will answer later (when back from holidays) but I want to add that it would be great to reach a consensus on Levantine romanization so that Levantine entries in the English Wiktionary, Levantine transcription used on the English Wikipedia (w:Levantine Arabic), and the Levantine course on Wikibooks all use the same Romanization. If one day the South Levantine Wikipedia is approved, we could even use it to automatically transliterate the Arabic script (similar to what is done on the Kazakh Wikipedia, which offers Cyrillic, Latin, and Arabic scripts, automatically converted).

On Wikibooks, original research is allowed so we can use any Romanization we want; on Wiktionary, I think there's also some freedom to set a different standard if there's a consensus. But on Wikipedia, I assume we should use an existing Romanization scheme from an external quality source.

So if we agree on this goal (a common Romanization scheme for Levantine on all Wikimedia projects), then we're limited to existing Romanizations of Arabic (because of Wikipedia's limitations). 10 are presented there: w:Romanization of Arabic and 6 for Levantine there: w:Levantine Arabic. Unfortunately, I'm not a big fan of any of them, but if had to choose I would go for Elihay, Aldrich, Wehr, or EALL. What do you think?