- There are many existing transliteration systems for Arabic, among them SATTS (developed to allow for transmission of Arabic text over telegraphs), the Buckwalter system (developed by Tim Buckwalter), Arabic chat alphabets (used in electronic communications before Arabic script could be easily rendered on electronic devices like phones), and numerous others listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Arabic. There's also the Maltese alphabet, a Roman script used for Maltese (which is an Arabic language).
There are some linguistic oddities in the article, like this: "Emphatic Letters: These letters are pronounced from the back of the throat..." With the exception of heth (a voiceless pharyngeal fricative), the emphatic letters are actually pronounced with the tongue near the roof of the mouth (similar to English t, d, s etc.), but with a secondary articulation that varies across "dialects" (actually distinct Arabic languages). In some dialects the emphatics differ from the non-emphatics only in causing a slightly different articulation of the following vowel.
- Neat but it looks like it is reinventing the Arabic QWERTY layout slightly differently. The QWERTY layout uses shift for the special letters here. So ش is shift+S. Another neat thing is it maps the transliteration alphabet as inspiration for letters that don’t exist in English. For example, ع, Which is informally “3ayn”, is on the “e” key right below the 3 key. I don’t know if the transliteration bit is intentional or a coincidence.
- Reminds me of Yamli (https://www.yamli.com/arabic-keyboard/) which lets you type in English and transliterates it to Arabic. For example you type habibi and it transliterates it to حبيبي.
by skinkestek
1 subcomments
- Clicking in and hoping to see something about woed for word translation of Arabic, because that is something I enjoy when I see with other languages.
I know some people do it for fun and I don't doubt a number of them are taking the dumbest literal interpretation to make it even funnier, but I really wish there was more emphasis on "this is how natives of the language express this sentence" when learning: not only idioms, but also how ordinary sentences are built different.
(And pointers to resources that do just that would be welcome :-)
- The author of the article needs to get in touch with a Lebanese person. Just about any Lebanese who has lived mostly in Lebanon will do.
They have a popular and simple system for writing Arabic in Latin, with numerals stepping in for certain Arabic letters.
- مرحبا أهلاً وسهلاً ياحبيبي
لزم تشوف يملي
https://www.yamli.com/editor/ar/
إلين بنكتب في هكر نيوز بالعربي
فهمت؟
- Arabic fonts give me such envy. Why can't Latin fonts be so beautiful?
- Great so I can understand what the hamas are telling me about their bombing plans on X.
- Great work. I was expecting to use the informal transliteration keyboard, using 3 for ع
or using 2 for ء
or 7 for ح
- Yamli did this ~20 years ago.
- your beginning and end of word examples render weirdly here (chrome/android). e.g. byt should be بيت without the squiggle at the beginning
- Finglish also so popular in Persian
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