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by elgenie 2880 days ago
> There's a reason why there's a plethora of transcriptions of "مُحمّد‎" after all.

There's a plethora of transcriptions into (more) phonetic alphabets because there are a plethora of regionalized pronunciations [1]. And there are a plethora of pronunciations because Arabic uses an impure abjad [2]. Since the vowels are not always, exactly or uniformly specified in writing, unspecified behavior leads to varying results in each compiler.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_(name)#Transliteratio... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjad#Impure_abjads