Reply #29: That confused me too. [View All]

AD is inconsistent in the symbol.

I finally decided he's using 'c' where many would use a left apostrophe (one that is concave to the right); the usual symbol if the typeface allows it is very similar to a san serif superscript 'c'. It's used to transliterate the Arabic letter 'ayin, a voiced pharyngeal fricative (more commonly pronounced as a pharyngealized glottal stop, the strangly noise that is taken to be characteristic of Arabic). I use an ' to represent the letter/sound in Shi'a. It's also in Sa'udi, 'Iraaq, 'Uman (Iraq, Oman), and a mess of other words.

Standard newspaper transliteration practice is to simply drop it out. In some cases, it's transliterated as an 'a' because the 'ayin is frequently very similar to an 'a' in sound (for very good physiological reasons). Baath, Meshaal, are slightly more properly Ba'th and Mesh'al (or Mesh'aal). One quirky bit of trivia is that it makes many Arab pronunciations of "Iraq" more similar to the stereotypical southern redneck eye-RAAK than to the standard English pronunuciation. :-)

I use ' for 'ayin when it's necessary (for me at least) to identify the Arabic, or when it's between vowels and is needed to make sure that two vowels aren't assumed to form a diphthong or have a glide between them. For example, al-qa'ida has 4 syllables: al, qa, 'i, da; Shi'a has two syllables, shi, 'a, and isn't ever "shee-ya".

Of course, this is "Standard Arabic" and its religious counterpart, not necessarily true for all dialects.