Perseverance — Page x
Writer’s Note TRANSLITERATION In general, the transliteration is a phonetic spelling of the word as it sounds in its original language, with hyphens separating multiple words where applicable. An attempt has been made to respect the sovereignty and grammatical boundaries of foreign languages when transliterating their vocabulary into English. In conformity with American writing convention, foreign words are written in italics, unless they are names, proper nouns or have become assimilated in English usage. After initially italicizing the foreign words, they may be written in normal script thereafter. Many of the foreign words in this book are of Arabic origin, which uses strong guttural sounds; whereas Urdu words are much softer even though they are, in most cases, derived from the Arabic language. I have deviated from the Ahmadiyya Community’s official transliteration system in order to help Western readers pronounce these two different languages. Although the words may be spelled the same with the same foreign characters, they are pronounced differently in the Arabic and the Urdu languages.