Finglish also so popular in Persian
Show HN: Writing Arabic in English
21–27 of 27 posts
Re: Show HN: Writing Arabic in English
#22Arabic fonts give me such envy. Why can't Latin fonts be so beautiful?
The grass is always greener but, then again, Arabic has a unique history of incorporation into visual art, eg this drawing of a bird: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Caligrafia_arabe_pajaro...
Re: Show HN: Writing Arabic in English
#23There 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_Arabi…
The idea here is not to transliterate (it's easy) but to have a keyboard that you can use without having Arabic key stickers. A mapping like this makes it easier to memorize the layout, because you can use English letters as a guide. This strategy is also useful for other languages. For example, the regular Russian keyboard layout is "ЙЦУКЕН". It's completely phonetically different from "QWERTY", so if you can't touc…
You're right, but: there's a one-to-one correspondence between some of these transliteration systems and the Arabic script (at least the Arabic script as used for Arabic, not for Arabic script as used for Urdu, western Punjabi, Pashto and other languages that use that script). And if you have a one-to-one correspondence, the keyboard can output Arabic letters as easily as Latin letters.
Re: Show HN: Writing Arabic in English
#24The 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.
There's also the Maltese language which is an Arabic dialect (mixed with bits of Italian for historical reasons) which is officially written in the Latin alphabet.
Re: Show HN: Writing Arabic in English
#25Clicking 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 id…
Are you referring to the language examples in the article?
Could you please give an example of what you mean?
Re: Show HN: Writing Arabic in English
#26your beginning and end of word examples render weirdly here (chrome/android). e.g. byt should be بيت without the squiggle at the beginning
Re: Show HN: Writing Arabic in English
#27Great so I can understand what the hamas are telling me about their bombing plans on X.