ARABIC - BRITISH WAR OFFICE.

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Short Glossary of Arabic. Rare first and only edition of this Arabic glossary for use on foreign maps, produced by the British War Office. It explains the use of Arabic terms on maps covering territories to the east of the Libyan-Egyptian border, and was part of an extensive series published in the 1940s.The spelling and transliteration follow the RGS II System conventions devised by the Royal Geographical Society's Permanent Committee on Geographical Names in 1921 (updating those used by the War Office and Admiralty after 1885). 0The introduction includes a survey of the history of the Arabic language, its alphabet, pronunciation, and dialects, in view of instructing soldiers, pilots, and surveyors on how to read and pronounce names on maps of the Middle East. "An Arabic word may appear on European maps in numerous transliterated forms, each depending upon the national authority of the map and the principle of transliteration applied to the names on it" (p. 2), due to the "considerable play" between a, e, and i, and other such alternative renditions of specific letters and sounds. The four-column table provides abbreviations, transliteration, the Arabic-script version, and the meaning of Arabic words commonly found on maps. For instance, aqra' is rendered as "without vegetation", ashqar as "reddish", ghurd as "sand dune", and zallaq as "slippery place", specifying if a noun is a plural and/or in a different grammatical case. Words originating from other languages (Berber, He

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