Buckwalter transliteration

The Buckwalter Arabic transliteration was developed as part of the ALPNET Arabic Project being run by Ken Beesley in 1988. Start The first Arabic language analyst for the project was a BYU undergraduate student named Derek Foxley, hired as part-time. Foxley was in 4th year Arabic courses at the time at BYU. Tim Buckwalter was employed several months later as a full-time employee of ALPNET. Buckwalter was also a PhD candidate in Arabic at the time. One of his tasks on the project was to collaborate with and assign Arabic language tasks to the part-time employee, Foxley. Beesley mentored Buckwalter and Foxley in some of the finer details of linguistics, and one day at the whiteboard Beesley prodded Foxley and Buckwalter to come up with a transliteration schema at that moment. Foxley had been entering most of the data at that point in the project so was ready to address this. Nevertheless, in close collaboration with Buckwalter he came up with nearly all the characters used for the transliteration table. Buckwalter oversaw Foxley's Arabic tasks and made the final adjustments and refinements the transliteration table. It had no name at the time, however, Buckwalter in a few years following the project had entered thousands of textual items using the transliteration schema and presented it, and championed it, many times as well. It was, therefore, named after him. At the time, no such one-for-one letter transliteration was in use, or at least none that the team was aware of.