Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 70 posts

Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script

#51

Post by schoen »

planteen wrote: post #34
lh7 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from that, Spanish, Catalan, and Occitan have historically been written using both the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets, by their respective user communities. Same for Yiddish, linguistically a Germanic language, which was often written using Hebrew script. Turkish seems to flip from Arabic to Latin and vice-versa every few decades. English written in Arabic script looks surprisingly natural to me.

Is there a simple algorithm for Latin letters to Arabic ones (meaning logic input letters, not shaped ones)? Or are there lots of complexities? My understanding of the Arabic language is that most vowels are omitted in writing, but that might be wrong.

It would have to depend on what language you're trying to transliterate, because the phonetic meaning of the Latin letters is different depending on the language they're used to represent (and for many languages, depending on the particular word). For example, ti- will usually be /tʃi/ in Brazilian Portuguese and /tɪ/ in English. Typically each orthography is specific to a language and a script doesn't encode sounds in a consistent language-independent way, so you have to know something about both the source and target languages to devise a transliteration system.

Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script

#52

Post by Zaheer »

For anyone interested in this space one of my buddies made a site / apps for helping write Arabic transliterations: http://www.arabictypist.com/

Not sure if he's active on HN so posting it for him and forwarding Eskéndereyya to him. Great work OP!

Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script

#53

Post by krick »

kahnpro wrote: post #23
thekid314 wrote: post #3

I'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 wo…

I've been learning Russian for two years, and I can only agree with you. Learning to read and write Cyrillic script was the easiest part of this adventure. And I think learning all sorts of nuances of the language would be more complicated using Latin script. Latin script also hides the fact that, even though the letters are similar, they really are different sounds. I feel like it would only hinder pronunciation.

It really isn't fair to compare Cyrillic script with Arabic. Cyrillic is basically the same script as Latin, even characters are alike. Hell, even something like Japanese hiragana is pretty much the same stuff as Latin alphabet, even though it looks nothing like that and is built upon syllables, not letters. And hence it is a bit harder to learn, but not by much.

However Arabic script is a whole different thing. It has a whole lot of diacritics, characters change their shape depending on the position within a word, characters are notably less distinctive for an unaccustomed European than Latin letters, Cyrillic letters, hiragana or runes.

Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script

#54

Post by krick »

vostok wrote: post #50
varjag wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Й and ё are in Russian alphabet. In schools it is never highlighted that those are diacritics, so to many it doesn't register.

Are those diacritics? I tend to think of them as separate letters just as å and ä are separate letters in Swedish. Of course, ё is usually written as е so I may well be wrong about that. This is different from è, é, ë, and ê in French where these are all e, but with different diacritics.

That's my impression of the statement as well. Even if technically they can be called diacritics it doesn't make much sense, not within this discussion. "Й" sounds absolutely unlike "и" and has pretty much no connection to it. "Ё" is a bit more tricky, but nevertheless — there's no another letter in Russian alphabet we could put umlaut on and get the result similar to putting umlaut on "е".

I guess "ь" has more right to be called diacritic, because it genuinely has 1 purpose: altering the other sounds. But even that is treated as a separate letter.

It's nothing like diacritics in French, German or even Latvian, let alone Arabic.

Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script

#55

Post by Natsu »

involans wrote: post #43

Trying to explain glottal stops with English examples is pointless - "Apple" doesn't begin with a glottal stop in English; "fear" and "ear" differ only in the absence of /f/. German does introduce a epenthetic glottal stop before word-initial vowels, but not English. Also, attempting to explain /ɪ/ as "Fin" -> "fen" is also unhelpful.

There's a glottal stop between book and case in bookcase, though.

Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script

#57

Post by empath75 »

alirazaq wrote: post #39
ue_ wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Using a romanized scripts makes all these subsequent steps with grammar and accents much harder. This is the exact problem with learning Japanese using roumaji (rouma ji = roman character; ローマ字), because you of course start to read the latin script with your starting accent (assuming of course your first language is written using the latin alphabet). However some textbooks persist with using it, despite being excell…

Except romaji isn't used to teach pronunciation, it's meant to help the student read while they are still getting familiar with kana; much like furigana for kanji. Japanese characters have one pronunciation in all circumstances (excluding diacritical modifications). Respectively in romaji, consonants and vowels will always have the same pronunciation. Compare that to American English where accents have been removed a…

unvoiced vowels at the end of sentences sometimes get dropped in Japanese 'です' (more 'dess' than 'desu'). So it's not entirely consistent.

Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script

#58

Post by lisivka »

varjag wrote: post #45
vetinari wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do I understand you right, that Arabic uses diacritics when written in Arabic script? Or did you mean Arabic when written in Latin script? Using diacritics is usually a sign, that the language uses a script that does not map very well to the target language, so the latter would be understandable. Slavic languages would the same in this regards. Those, that are written in Latin script, have to use diacritics. Those th…

All Cyrillic alphabets I am aware of do use diacritics. Й, Ў, Ё, Ґ..

Those letters use no diacritics. They are just letters.

Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script

#59

Post by lisivka »

vetinari wrote: post #47
varjag wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All Cyrillic alphabets I am aware of do use diacritics. Й, Ў, Ё, Ґ..

While you are of course right, that there exist such characters, Belorussian and Ukrainian are not all Cyrillic alphabets. But then, I'm also not an expert on all Slavic languages, I just remember when I was taught Russian and azbuka years ago, there was none and that caught my attention.

> Belorussian and Ukrainian are not all Cyrillic alphabets.

LOL Please, tell us an «all Cyrillic» alphabet. Old Church Slavonic by Saints Cyril and Methodius maybe?

Why Belorussian and Ukrainian are «not all Cyrillic alphabets»? (I'm Ukrainian).

Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script

#60

Post by intopieces »

School-Cotton wrote: post #16
thekid314 wrote: post #3

I'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 wo…

I studied Russian for one semester when I was in middle school. I didn't learn very much and can remember even less: only a few simple words like яблоко (yabloko -- "apple"). But I can still sound out words in the Cyrillic alphabet without any difficulty. Learning another alphabetic script really doesn't take that much time or effort.

Cyrillic is easy until you see it written in cursive :)
Post reply on HN