The Foundation of Muslim Rule in India: A History of the Establishment and Progress of the Turkish Sultanate of Delhi, 1206–1290 A.D. c2.4

c2.4

To critics I owe an explanation for what may be called unscientific method of transcribing non-English words. My defence is convenience, convenience for the reader and for the printers. Besides, the use of diacritical marks has always seemed to me to smack a little of pedantry for, to the scholar familiar with the language, they are unnecessary, and to one not knowing it, they are equally useless except to show off the author's knowledge. Except for the philologist and the precisian, phonetic approximation, I feel, must remain the easiest, because the most natural, means of renderng foreign words. For place names which, with their admittedly phonetic inaccuracies, have almost become part of the English language, I have retained the spelling used in the gazetteers except for Mathurah and Awadh whose anglicised pronunciations are too atrocious to be used.