Of
these points of departure from established usage I need only
particularize some of the more important; the others will, in
general, be found to speak for themselves. One of the most salient
is the case of the short vowel fet-heh, which is usually written
[a breve], but which I have thought it better to render, as a
rule, by [e breve], as in "bed" (a sound practically equivalent
to that of a, as in "beggar," adopted by the late Mr. Lane to
represent this vowel), reserving the English a, as in "father,"
to represent the alif of prolongation or long Arabic a, since I
should else have no means of differentiating the latter from the
former, save by the use of accents or other clumsy expedients, at
once, to my mind, foreign to the purpose and vexatious to the
reader of a work of pure literature. In like manner, I have
eschewed the use of the letter q, as an equivalent for the dotted
or guttural kaf (choosing to run the risk of occasionally
misleading the reader as to the original Arabic form of a word
by leaving him in ignorance whether the k used is the dotted
or undotted one,--a point of no importance whatever to the
non-scientific public,--rather than employ an English letter in a
manner completely unwarranted by the construction of our
language, in which q has no power as a terminal or as moved by
any vowel other than u, followed by one of the four others) and
have supplied its place, where the dotted kaf occurs as a
terminal or as preceding a hard vowel, by the hard c, leaving k
to represent it (in common with the undotted kaf generally) in
those instances where it is followed by a soft vowel.
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