<p>Harakat (diacritics) are actually pretty rare in _any_ Arabic writing, unless it&#x27;s the Quran (because meaning needs to be very exact&#x2F;nuanced) or educational (for kids or other learners of the language). In fact, I think historically, not just the diacritics but even the dots (eg ب or ت) would be skipped, and people would guess the letter and pronunciation based on the context.<p>But you&#x27;re right, with transliteration, it&#x27;s much harder to guess because the sounds&#x2F;combinations of letters are not typical, and the words are unfamiliar. So you just guess a bit and then you get corrected when you hear the sound (eg, on the song).

<p>Question for Arabic speakers: The Arabic transliterations don&#x27;t have vowel markings (harakat). So how are you able to reproduce the pronunciation? Are you able to just guess and get it right most of the time? Same with place names that you&#x27;ve never seen (the name of some random village you see on a map), how do people have any confidence that they&#x27;re saying it even remotely correctly?

<p>The &#x27;Eclipse&#x27; album is a classic.

Nubeian Translation for Childhood Songs by Hamza El Din