8 ms·

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

72 points by _samihasan_ 10y ago

mrkgnao 10y ago
That sounds like "Alexander". Interesting.
- yoo1I 10y ago
  ... not sure how well this system will fare, given that "Eskéndereyya" is 'literally' the arabic name of the city of Alexandria.
  - _samihasan_ 10y ago
    Just a minor correction, "Eskéndereyya" is Alexandria in Egyptian Arabic not MSA. In MSA, it's "al Iskándareyya" using this writing system rules.
- jmstfv 10y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkic_languages [1] https://translate.google.com/#en/ar/alexander https://translate.google.com/#en/ar/alexander Edit: fixed spacing
  - _samihasan_ 10y ago
    Yes. In MSA, it's "Iskandar" and in Egyptian Arabic it's "Eskandar".
thekid314 10y ago
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 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?
- ue_ 10y ago
  >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 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 https://youtu.be/aLEtZ2CRoho?t=1m53s The mental association is everything.
  - _samihasan_ 10y ago
    Well, I must say that I fail to see the rationale of this argument as I speak other European languages and I haven't encountered this problem before. 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.
    - ue_ 10y ago
      I think the case is different for languages that use the same script, such as a European language learner learning another European language. The learner must learn to switch "modes" and this is reinforced all the time by any kind of reading, because the learner has no choice but to switch modes. However this mode switching is not reinforced in the case where the script (in this case the Japanese script) is not latin-based. I think I'm trying to say that native speakers of latin-based languages who are learning latin-based languages have to learn to change their mode of pronunciation, whereas if they were to learn a non-latin-based language they don't (and shouldn't) learn this at all, because in the long run it isn't useful.
Raed667 10y ago
This 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)
- _samihasan_ 10y ago
  Well, "أهلاً بكم" which means "Welcome" for second person plural in English is transliterated into "Eskéndereyya" as "ählan bekom". 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".
wisam 10y ago
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. 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.
- _samihasan_ 10y ago
  Author here. 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.
  - lh7 10y ago
    Hi. I applaud your motivation, but to be honest, when I was learning Arabic, the only trouble I would regularly run into would be with the tashkeel, which I find difficult to memorise. On the other hand, it was much easier for me to associate each letter with their respective sound(s).
grzm 10y ago
Some discussion from a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12956885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12956885
kylehotchkiss 10y ago
So cool! Language translation standardization projects are great teaching tools
cagataygurturk 10y ago
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.
planteen 10y ago
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...
- cup 10y ago
  Come to the middle east. Plenty of English words written in Arabic. McDonald's and subway immediately come to mind.
  - subliminalpanda 10y ago
    Always got a chuckle when Canadian tourists would take pictures of Tim Hortons written in Arabic: http://cdn.torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/tim-hortons-oman.jpg http://cdn.torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/tim-ho...
    - _samihasan_ 10y ago
      I prefer to write Tim Hortons like this "تِم هُرتُنز" in Arabic but that's just me.
  - lh7 10y ago
    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.
    - planteen 10y ago
      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.
miage 10y ago
Your case endings in the exercise are wrong, it should be "Rȃbbi assamáu," "ära alħayáta"
- _samihasan_ 10y ago
  That's right in abstract but in the context of poetry, the case ending can change arbitrarily and rules are bent to serve the medium, and that's what exactly Shakira did in this song. :)
htns 10y ago
Why not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_31635 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_31635 or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_233 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_233?
anonu 10y ago
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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_chat_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_chat_alphabet
- _samihasan_ 10y ago
  The problem with this system, besides the appearance and inherent ambiguity to name a few, is that it doesn't cover essential parts of the language like "stress" and "tonality" where other writing systems do.
intopieces 10y ago
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. This will make it more difficult to become proficient.
baudolino 10y ago
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. 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.
616c 10y ago
Super slick and exicitng. Since this is my wheel house I will check it out later and report back something more constructive. 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qalb_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qalb_(programming_language)
involans 10y ago
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.
- samatman 10y ago
  At least in my accent, the 'tt' in written is a glottal stop.
- skellystudios 10y ago
  I've seen it described as the sound or throat action in the middle of "uh oh!". I found that kinda useful.
- Natsu 10y ago
  There's a glottal stop between book and case in bookcase, though.
Zaheer 10y ago
For anyone interested in this space one of my buddies made a site / apps for helping write Arabic transliterations: http://www.arabictypist.com/ 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!
mitchtbaum 10y ago
You may also like this universal script, Shwa. http://shwa.org/ http://shwa.org/
sirfz 10y ago
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.

72 points by _samihasan_ 10y ago

mrkgnao 10y ago

That sounds like "Alexander". Interesting.

yoo1I 10y ago
... not sure how well this system will fare, given that "Eskéndereyya" is 'literally' the arabic name of the city of Alexandria.
- _samihasan_ 10y ago
  Just a minor correction, "Eskéndereyya" is Alexandria in Egyptian Arabic not MSA. In MSA, it's "al Iskándareyya" using this writing system rules.
jmstfv 10y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkic_languages [1] https://translate.google.com/#en/ar/alexander https://translate.google.com/#en/ar/alexander Edit: fixed spacing
- _samihasan_ 10y ago
  Yes. In MSA, it's "Iskandar" and in Egyptian Arabic it's "Eskandar".

thekid314 10y ago

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 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?

ue_ 10y ago
>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 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 https://youtu.be/aLEtZ2CRoho?t=1m53s The mental association is everything.
- _samihasan_ 10y ago
  Well, I must say that I fail to see the rationale of this argument as I speak other European languages and I haven't encountered this problem before. 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.
  - ue_ 10y ago
    I think the case is different for languages that use the same script, such as a European language learner learning another European language. The learner must learn to switch "modes" and this is reinforced all the time by any kind of reading, because the learner has no choice but to switch modes. However this mode switching is not reinforced in the case where the script (in this case the Japanese script) is not latin-based. I think I'm trying to say that native speakers of latin-based languages who are learning latin-based languages have to learn to change their mode of pronunciation, whereas if they were to learn a non-latin-based language they don't (and shouldn't) learn this at all, because in the long run it isn't useful.

Raed667 10y ago

This 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)

_samihasan_ 10y ago
Well, "أهلاً بكم" which means "Welcome" for second person plural in English is transliterated into "Eskéndereyya" as "ählan bekom". 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".

wisam 10y ago

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. 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.

_samihasan_ 10y ago
Author here. 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.
- lh7 10y ago
  Hi. I applaud your motivation, but to be honest, when I was learning Arabic, the only trouble I would regularly run into would be with the tashkeel, which I find difficult to memorise. On the other hand, it was much easier for me to associate each letter with their respective sound(s).

grzm 10y ago

Some discussion from a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12956885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12956885

kylehotchkiss 10y ago

So cool! Language translation standardization projects are great teaching tools

cagataygurturk 10y ago

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.

planteen 10y ago

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...

cup 10y ago
Come to the middle east. Plenty of English words written in Arabic. McDonald's and subway immediately come to mind.
- subliminalpanda 10y ago
  Always got a chuckle when Canadian tourists would take pictures of Tim Hortons written in Arabic: http://cdn.torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/tim-hortons-oman.jpg http://cdn.torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/tim-ho...
  - _samihasan_ 10y ago
    I prefer to write Tim Hortons like this "تِم هُرتُنز" in Arabic but that's just me.
- lh7 10y ago
  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.
  - planteen 10y ago
    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.

miage 10y ago

Your case endings in the exercise are wrong, it should be "Rȃbbi assamáu," "ära alħayáta"

_samihasan_ 10y ago
That's right in abstract but in the context of poetry, the case ending can change arbitrarily and rules are bent to serve the medium, and that's what exactly Shakira did in this song. :)

htns 10y ago

Why not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_31635 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_31635 or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_233 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_233?

anonu 10y ago

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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_chat_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_chat_alphabet

_samihasan_ 10y ago
The problem with this system, besides the appearance and inherent ambiguity to name a few, is that it doesn't cover essential parts of the language like "stress" and "tonality" where other writing systems do.

intopieces 10y ago

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. This will make it more difficult to become proficient.

baudolino 10y ago

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. 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.

616c 10y ago

Super slick and exicitng. Since this is my wheel house I will check it out later and report back something more constructive. 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qalb_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qalb_(programming_language)

involans 10y ago

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.

samatman 10y ago
At least in my accent, the 'tt' in written is a glottal stop.
skellystudios 10y ago
I've seen it described as the sound or throat action in the middle of "uh oh!". I found that kinda useful.
Natsu 10y ago
There's a glottal stop between book and case in bookcase, though.

Zaheer 10y ago

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

mitchtbaum 10y ago

You may also like this universal script, Shwa. http://shwa.org/ http://shwa.org/

sirfz 10y ago

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.