Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script
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Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script
#2That sounds like "Alexander". Interesting.
Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script
#3I'll play devils advocate here. Their solution is too complex and tries to fix a non-problem.
For someone learning Arabic the letters are the first of many challenging steps. I learned the Arabic letters in 1 day with flashcards. That single day was easy compared with everything that came afterwards. Using a romanized scripts makes all these subsequent steps with grammar and accents much harder.
I can see how this would be helpful in accurately learning new accents, but accents are notoriously inaccurate and flexible, the Arabic letters leave that flexibility, outside of academic text Romanized letters would require so many exceptions that it be like nailing jello to a wall.
It would be useful for news organizations if this system was applied across many languages so that we can always spell and pronounce names correctly.
The use of non-english keyboard letters creates complexity. I much prefer the use of number replacements for letters that teens use when texting. sa7?
Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script
#4That sounds like "Alexander". Interesting.
... not sure how well this system will fare, given that "Eskéndereyya" is 'literally' the arabic name of the city of Alexandria.
Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script
#5This looks a lot how many Arabs write using Latin keyboards.
Example : "أهلاً بكم", becomes "ahlan bekom"
I find it a cook 'quick-an-dirty' trick to start speaking/writing with locals without worrying much about proper grammar (which is EXTREMELY complex)
Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script
#6I was going to ask "why?" before I read in the overview the reason being helping non Arabic speaking learners of the language. It still defeats the purpose of learning a language to be able to read literature written in original script and communicate in writing with the language readers. The only case where I see this useful is when verbally communicating using words memorized using this Latin script as tourists do when visiting a foreign land.
As an Arab I also hope that the motivation behind this is not ideological. Like how the Turkish language was transformed to use a Latin-based script system.
Edit: As of the claim of it being useful to Arabs, please no! Arabs when use "Arabish" tend to use it badly with no vowels making pronouncing words hard and sometimes ambiguous. The "Arabish" trend was popular in the 90's (in the infancy of Internet or at least Internet penetration) and has declined dramatically in the 2000's. Arabs lazy enough to not write in Arabic script would also be lazy enough to not learn the proper usage of this Latin script.
Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script
#7That sounds like "Alexander". Interesting.
Languages (or language families) that are influenced by Arabic (Turkic family[0], for example) `interpret` Alexander as such, albeit with slight modifications (Iskender[TR], İsgəndər[AZ] and so on). If you listen to the pronunciation[1] of Alexander in Arabic you could witness that this is indeed the case.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkic_languages
[1] https://translate.google.com/#en/ar/alexander
Edit: fixed spacing
Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script
#8Some discussion from a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12956885
Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script
#9That sounds like "Alexander". Interesting.
... not sure how well this system will fare, given that "Eskéndereyya" is 'literally' the arabic name of the city of Alexandria.
Just a minor correction, "Eskéndereyya" is Alexandria in Egyptian Arabic not MSA. In MSA, it's "al Iskándareyya" using this writing system rules.
Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script
#10That sounds like "Alexander". Interesting.
Languages (or language families) that are influenced by Arabic (Turkic family[0], for example) `interpret` Alexander as such, albeit with slight modifications (Iskender[TR], İsgəndər[AZ] and so on). If you listen to the pronunciation[1] of Alexander in Arabic you could witness that this is indeed the case. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkic_languages [1] https://translate.google.com/#en/ar/alexander Edit: fixed…
Yes.
In MSA, it's "Iskandar" and in Egyptian Arabic it's "Eskandar".