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?
Thanks for the feedback.
I might disagree with your characterization that the problem I'm addressing here as a non-problem as writing systems are there for a reason and so is mine.
Eskéndereyya doesn't tackle the problem of Arabic letters memorization as this is a very simple problem to crack. It instead addresses pronunciation and reading and to a lesser degree writing as you may know that the common way to write and serve text in Arabic is without diacritics, and for this reason, it becomes hard for beginners to practice and improve their skills without aid and this is where I envisioned Eskéndereyya to fill the gap.
I'm not sure what you're trying to convey with the part of accents in your comment. Are you referring to Arabic regional dialects/languages?
Re complexity, doing nothing will always be less costly that doing something in terms of energy and effort but this point of view overlooks the gains or return expected on the energy expended, and if the return turns out to greater than the costs, the endeavor is determined to be profitable and vice versa.
So, you may think that this layer of complexity is unnecessary but I will take your word "sa7" as an example to prove how I think otherwise.
"sa7" is "صح" in colloquial Arabic but it's still ambiguous and confusing as the letter "s" in Arabizi can mean both "س" or "ص" depending on context but when the word is transliterated as "šaħ", the ambiguity disappears with no room to error.
You might counter and say that there's no "سح" in Arabic but there actually is but it's less common since it's slang but featured in a well-known old Egyptian folk song titled "essaħ eddaħ embú السح الدح امبو"
To summarize, there's always a trade-off and it's up to you to decide which you to go.
I'd say you are on the wrong side. All Arabs continue to write in Arabizi. I have lived in this region for years, as a non-native speaker. When I first arrived as a student for my first rodeo in 2006, I once wrote SMS in Arabic letters. That Egyptian kid later asked why I would do that. He was terrified it was a plant or a trap or something, that is how rare it was then.
However, I will give you a point. None that we are moving beyond basic SMS encodings and the limit of standard cell phones and on to Unicode and emoji-rich smart phones, WhatsApp and others have enabled a renaissance in Arabic writing amongst some.
But many continue to write to me in English characters. And re your point learning in one day: the reading is fun, the writing on a keyboard for a society where Arabic literacy (not English, mind you) is largely de-emphasized and many cannot read/write formal Arabic, the desire for Arabizi hides deficienies people would not rather admit.
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 excellent otherwise (Japanese: The Spoken Language being one). I can't stress enough the need to move off reading Latin characters. It is also useful to learn the characters by sound rather than their roman equivalents. i.e instead of learning that ロ is "ro", you could learn it by listening: https://youtu.be/aLEtZ2CRoho?t=1m53s
The mental association is everything.
The mental process goes like this; I identify the language of text let's say Spanish and then like a switch in my brain is turned on for the Spanish pronunciation and then I proceed to read the text using the rules of the Spanish language while English is totally disabled.
This is not like unique to me as I observed other students with the same process. I can't really say that the issue you described is a universal issue for all language learners worldwide.
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 and even native speakers can have trouble pronouncing new words.
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.
I switched to French.
Exactly, for most other languages as well. I only needed flashcards with Hebrew (as an Arabic speaker, I only needed to remember shapes because sounds are similar). To learn Cyrillic was more figuring out what changes and connecting it to Greek alphabet (р is rho, г is gamma, д is delta, п is pi, etc).
Transliteration for most languages is just another layer of complexity in my opinion given the tiny amount of time I needed to acquire alphabet (the letters, not Google's parent company).
Here's something I started. Need to get back to that:
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.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkic_languages
[1] https://translate.google.com/#en/ar/alexander
Edit: fixed spacing
In MSA, it's "Iskandar" and in Egyptian Arabic it's "Eskandar".
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.
I found that kinda useful.
English written in Arabic script looks surprisingly natural to me.
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.
Thanks for the feedback.
Regarding the concern of this substituting the Arabic script, I addressed this in the intro section of the project where I laid it out plain and clear that the target is novice learners of Arabic as I noticed that they suffer with pronunciation and reading skills and I wanted to help them overcoming this gap to make the transition to the Arabic script smoother and less painful.
As far as I can tell, the project was not ideologically or politically motivated but to be honest with you, the Turkish language was an influencing factor on the development of this project whether which parts to use and which parts to pass but I am not sure if you know that Turkish throughout its history was not written only in Arabic script but in other scripts like for example Armenian but the Ottomans adopted the Arabic script for their official communications until came Mustafa Kemal and introduced his reforms and switched to Latin which was a good idea since writing Turkish in Arabic script was a nightmare.
Re your last concern, like I said in that part, it's for regional languages/dialects not the standard variety and I outlined the reasons for that.
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)
Note the umlaut mark on the letter "a" as it's a Hamzat Qaŧў همزة قطع and should be pronounced with glottal stop. Of course, in colloquial speech across many dialects, it softened to just a plain "a".
As someone suggested above, learning Arabic script is the first-- and smallest--of many challenges for those trying to learn formal Arabic.
There are few good systematized sources available for people trying to learn spoken Arabic, particularly if they're not particularly interested in reading the news or classical texts. I'm thinking of aid workers, diplomats, vagabonds, whatever.
A system such as this has great utility to these people— except it already exists in much of the Arabic-speaking world, particularly the Levant and Egypt, where numbers are used to represent sounds not found in the Latin alphabet.
For example: "You will speak Arabic soon" (Levantine) - "إنت رح تحكي عربي قريبا" - can also be rendered as "inta ra7 ti7ki 3rabi 2areeban". This makeshift system is used widely in texts in Lebanon and elsewhere. Utilizing this existing method will be easier and have wider applicability.
This will make it more difficult to become proficient.
Thanks for the work, sami. I love to see people bringing Arabic to the open source world. It needs love.
People might also like Qalb (heart or template, not sure which romanized as tired, validating comments later in this thread), which was an awesome idea to me.
Not sure if he's active on HN so posting it for him and forwarding Eskéndereyya to him. Great work OP!
