I'll play devils advocate here. Their solution is too complex and tries to fix a non-problem.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?
I 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.<p>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.<p>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.
This is a good idea, and one that I could certainly have used when learning Arabic— but its real utility is not for Modern Standard Arabic- it's for 'amiya/3amiya (spoken Arabic), which, to those not in the know, differs from region to region and is vastly different from both written and spoken forms of Modern Standard Arabic.<p>As someone suggested above, learning Arabic script is the first-- and <i>smallest</i>--of many challenges for those trying to learn formal Arabic.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
If you are Turkish and opted-in for religion classes in the school, you learn some parts of the Qoran reading them in Latin alphabet. Because we don't know arabic alphabet, but Turkish one (Latin alphabet with 3-4 extra letters). Actually one of the letters in "extended Eskéndereyya", "ş" is a Turkish letter, created for Turkish language. I don't understand why Eskéndereyya is different than the alphabet we used to use in high school.
This is not a good idea. From a language learning perspective, it is essential to become immersed in the sounds and shapes of a language as soon as possible. Approximations will not do. Arabic is equipped with sounds that foreign speakers are not able to produce without significant effort and coaching.<p>This will make it more difficult to become proficient.
Why not <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_31635" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_31635</a> or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_233" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_233</a>?
Super slick and exicitng. Since this is my wheel house I will check it out later and report back something more constructive.<p>Thanks for the work, sami. I love to see people bringing Arabic to the open source world. It needs love.<p>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.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qalb_(programming_language)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qalb_(programming_language)</a>
I like this idea. But I am not sure about its ease of use. There is a much less precise but significantly speedier way to convey Arabic words using the Roman alphabet on a QWERTY keyboard using the Arabic chat alphabet. [1]. The more difficult sounds in Arabic are conveyed with numbers. For example ح is 7 - and ع is 3. In both cases the Arabic letters are visually similar to the character that represents them.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_chat_alphabet" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_chat_alphabet</a>
This should certainly be adopted by official/serious projects (such as albums, movies, events, etc.) with Arabic names written in Latin script. The use of the "chat" form (e.g. "7" for "ح" and "3" for "ع") is just horrid and makes any serious work look childish.
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/.<p>German does introduce a epenthetic glottal stop before word-initial vowels, but not English.<p>Also, attempting to explain /ɪ/ as "Fin" -> "fen" is also unhelpful.
For anyone interested in this space one of my buddies made a site / apps for helping write Arabic transliterations: <a href="http://www.arabictypist.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.arabictypist.com/</a><p>Not sure if he's active on HN so posting it for him and forwarding Eskéndereyya to him. Great work OP!
Has anyone ever tried writing English in Arabic script? From working with complex text layout, I know Arabic letters have 4 forms (isolated, initial, medial, final). It would be kind of cool if I could spot check the shaping engine is working properly by testing with English in Arabic script...
This looks a lot how many Arabs write using Latin keyboards.<p>Example : "أهلاً بكم", becomes "ahlan bekom"<p>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)
Some discussion from a month ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12956885" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12956885</a>