Foreign words will be italicized and transliterated according to the system of The International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (for Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish) and the Library of Congress transliteration table (for Cyrillic). Foreign words and names occurring in quotations will be transliterated as will the titles of books. Personal and place names, however, unless in a quotation, will only be transliterated with diacritics in the index. Any words found as entries in either Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, or in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, Ninth Edition, including hadith, sura, iwan, khan, madrasah, mullah, mihrab, and shah will not be transliterated, unless found in a quotation, as they are deemed to be in common use.
Some of my transliterations may be considered eccentric; for example the transliteration of the very common name “Shayr” meaning “lion.”2 The names Shayr ʿAli Khan and Mir ʿAli Shayr Nawaʾi will probably be more familiar to students of Turko-Persianate history as Shir ʿAli Khan or Sher ʿAli Khan and Mir ʿAli Shir Navaʾi. The words for milk (shīr) and lion (shayr) are spelled identically in the Perso-Arabic alphabet. Unless the words are furnished with vowel markers, which is almost never the case, the proper vocalization depends on context, which will tell us whether ‘lion’ or ‘milk’ is signified. In personal names, it’s probably safe to say that the signifier shīn-yāʾ-rāʾ is never intended to be read as ‘milk.’ It is possible that the words for ‘lion’ and ‘milk’ (shayr pronounced like ‘share’ and shīr like ‘sheer’) were at times pronounced identically but we will never know. In any event, transliteration is the process of representing in one alphabet the characters of another, not how words that the characters represent were necessarily pronounced.3
See e.g., the indices to Fayz Muhammad 2013–2016 where the Shayr Ahmads, Shayr ʿAlis, Shayr Dils, Shayr Guls, Shayr Jans, Shayr Khans, Shayr Muhammads, Shayr Shahs and Shayr Zamans number in the hundreds.
The diphthong vocalization ‘shayr’ for ‘lion’ is found in Neghat 1993, s.v. and “sher” in Shukurov et al. 1969, s.v. Both also give ‘shīr’ for ‘milk.’ These dictionaries cover the Persian language in the region in which the four shrines are located.