Talk:Risalat al-Huquq

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Capitalization

Hi ‎Apaugasma! Thanks for your recent edits. This is fairly minor but, as a book title, there might be an argument for Al-Khisal instead of al-Khisal, even though al- is not capitalized otherwise on Wikipedia. What is your preference? (I'm guessing it's the latter...) Albertatiran (talk) 12:23, 11 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Albertatiran! No, in book titles the al- also doesn't get capitalized. The only exception where it does get capitalized is at the beginning of full sentences (clauses containing a verb and a subject), but even there some style guides advise trying to avoid starting the sentence with "al-" words altogether: "Al-" just looks weird. We're merely following standard usage in scholarly sources with this.

When talking about Arabic book titles, it's probably also worth noting that they are normally transliterated in sentence case (like in French: apart from words which have their own capitalization rules such as proper names or al-, only the first word gets capitalized, e.g., Ibn Qutayba's ʿUyūn al-akhbār or Ibn Kathir's al-Bidāya wa-l-nihāya), except when they the word Kitāb is added, in which case both Kitāb and the first word following it are capitalized (e.g., Jabir ibn Hayyan's Kitāb al-Raḥma al-kabīr or Ibn Kathir's Kitāb al-Bidāya wa-l-nihāya). ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 13:13, 11 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

This is very helpful. For your last point about transliteration in sentence case, do these titles become Kitāb al-Raḥma al-Kabīr and al-Raḥma al-Kabīr in the MLA format? Albertatiran (talk) 14:33, 11 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

No. The 9th edition (2021) of the MLA Handbook, section [2.98] on 'Languages in non-Latin alphabets' (e.g., Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Russian), says: In a transliterated title or subtitle, capitalize the first word and any words that would be capitalized in English prose—that is, capitalize it like a sentence. As an example they give ʻAlī wa-ummuhu al-Rūsīyah (Ali and His Russian Mother) –weird example, but whatever. This is part of their subsection [2.91] on 'Capitalizing Titles in Languages Other Than English', where they also cover the use of sentence case in French titles, etc. Actually, of all languages I know, only English uses title case. Title case as used in English is a bit of an outlier actually, with all kinds of special and esoteric rules to follow, whence probably why it's normally not used for transliterated titles. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 15:03, 11 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks very much! To summarize for future reference, it's Kitāb al-Raḥma al-kabīr or al-Raḥma al-kabīr. Got it! :) Albertatiran (talk) 16:03, 11 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]