Corpus design for speech synthesis is a well-researched topic in languages such as English compared to Modern Standard Arabic, and there is a tendency to focus on methods to automatically generate the orthographic transcript to be recorded (usually greedy methods). In this work, a study of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) phonetics and phonology is conducted in order to create criteria for a greedy method to create a speech corpus transcript for recording. The size of the dataset is reduced a number of times using these optimisation methods with different parameters to yield a much smaller dataset with identical phonetic coverage than before the reduction, and this output transcript is chosen for recording. This is part of a larger work to create a completely annotated and segmented speech corpus for MSA.