Transliteration means putting the letters of one alphabet into another alphabet. There are sounds in Arabic and Persian which have no English equivalents. For this reason letters and combinations have to be made up to represent these sounds: gh, kh, and so forth. Besides this, Persian has four z’s, three s’s, two i’s and two h’s, which have to be differentiated in English by made-up letters, such as ḍ, th and ṭ.

Persian and Arabic pronunciation varies throughout the Middle East; people from Cairo, Ṭihrán and Káshán respectively would pronounce the same word three different ways. These variations are the greater because short vowels are not written; for example, “cat" would be spelled “ct.". A Persian, seeing for the first time a list of unfamiliar Persian towns, cannot tell how to pronounce them. (To help Persian and Arab readers pronounce unfamiliar words "diacritical"" marks are used.) Ṭihrán Persian is considered the best.

In the early days, Orientalists added to the confusion by transliterating Persian and Arabic to suit themselves. A German might spell Sháh "Schah"" while a Frenchman spelled it "Chah.". On March 12, 1923, the Guardian of the Faith requested the Bahá’ís to “avoid confusion in future" by faithfully adhering to a uniform spelling (which had been adopted at one of the International Oriental Congresses). On November 26, 1923, the Guardian wrote:

“I am confident that the friends will not feel their energy and patience taxed by a scrupulous adherence to what is an authoritative and universal, though arbitrary code for the spelling of Oriental terms."" These communications from Shoghi Effendi appear in Bahá’í Administration, page 56.

The result has been that order has replaced the previous individualistic and whimsical spelling of various early texts. Today a student, seeing a Persian or Arabic word transliterated according to this system, can immediately write the word back into the original, whereas formerly he often had to guess at what the original might be.

The “rhymes-with"" and the “sounds-like"" method is in the present writer’s view the easiest now available. The American public is not polyglot and balks at phonetic symbols and other complicated aids familiar to linguists. An accurate pronunciation can be acquired only by listening to, and imitating, persons accurately speaking a given tongue. At best, the present text can provide only an approximation to the original Persian sounds.

It was not possible to include every proper noun in the Bahá’í Writings, but an attempt has been made to list names most often present in compounds. If a Persian or Arabic name is carefully scrutinized, element by element, it will prove easier to deal with: Shaykh Ahmad-i-Ahs’í means a religious leader named Aḥmad from the town of Aḥsá. Ḥájí Mírzá Siyyid ‘Alí means one who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca, is of the scholar class and a descendant of the Prophet Muḥammad, and named ‘Alí. The compound Abu’l-Ḥasan means Father of Ḥasan. The last element, when it does not refer to a town, often denotes the man’s occupation: Buzzáz is a cloth merchant, Rikáb-Sáz a stirrup maker. Mírzá at the beginning of a name denotes an educated person or a scholar; at the end of a name it means Prince.