ALA-LC romanization tables

[Anshuman Pandey]

On Mon, 7 Apr 1997, Royce Wiles wrote:

> For the webpage on various scripts, you might want to have a look at the 
> following title which gives a considerable number of romanization tables 
> etc.
> 
>  TITLE        ALA-LC romanization tables : transliteration schemes for non-
>                 Roman scripts / approved by the Library of Congress and the
>                 American Library Association ; tables compiled and edited by
>                 Randall K. Barry.

One would imagine that an such a publication would maintain some sort of
constancy in the transliteration of various scripts derived from a single
script such as Arabic. But such an assumption may largely be due to my 
ignorance on academic/scholarly standardizations. I was complexed as to
why certain characters of the Urdu script which are found in the Arabic as
well were transliterated differently from that of the Arabic. There were
also some differences in the transliteration between Urdu and Persian.

Could anyone clarify as to why such variations were decided upon?

Regards,
Anshuman Pandey
University of Washington
apandey at u.washington.edu