Show HN: Writing Arabic in English

A phonetic Arabic keyboard I created maps English letters to Arabic sounds, covering emphatic letters, hamza, and diacritics—making it easier for learners and casual users to type Arabic.

▲

mcswell 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

There 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_Arabic. There's also the Maltese alphabet, a Roman script used for Maltese (which is an Arabic language).

There are some linguistic oddities in the article, like this: "Emphatic Letters: These letters are pronounced from the back of the throat..." With the exception of heth (a voiceless pharyngeal fricative), the emphatic letters are actually pronounced with the tongue near the roof of the mouth (similar to English t, d, s etc.), but with a secondary articulation that varies across "dialects" (actually distinct Arabic languages). In some dialects the emphatics differ from the non-emphatics only in causing a slightly different articulation of the following vowel.

▲

cyberax 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

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 touch-type, you'll need Russian keyboard stickers. But there's also a phonetic layout "ЯВЕРТЫ" which puts similarly sounding Russian letters onto the same keys as English letters.

	▲	Ozzie_osman 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This also exists for Arabic and other languages and has for maybe twenty years. The first popular Arabic one was by a startup called Yamli. Google then launched a transliteration tool called Ta3reeb (I was working there at the time and helped build it during my 20% time). Microsoft then launched one called Maren. They all let you type English letters then would try to deduce the Arabic words/script for it, and though the keyboard and mapping weren't exact, through some pretty primitive spell checks you could get 95% of the way there.
	▲	mcswell 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.

▲

cenamus 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

And don't forget the German DMG transcription. As they say in Linguistics, the most important language to learn when studying semitic languages is German, as German linguist basically did everything you could think of in the 19th century already

▲

kdaker 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Neat but it looks like it is reinventing the Arabic QWERTY layout slightly differently. The QWERTY layout uses shift for the special letters here. So ش is shift+S. Another neat thing is it maps the transliteration alphabet as inspiration for letters that don’t exist in English. For example, ع, Which is informally “3ayn”, is on the “e” key right below the 3 key. I don’t know if the transliteration bit is intentional or a coincidence.

▲

ls-a 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Reminds me of Yamli (https://www.yamli.com/arabic-keyboard/) which lets you type in English and transliterates it to Arabic. For example you type habibi and it transliterates it to حبيبي.

▲

eddythompson80 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Windows used to have one that acted as a system keyboard. Funny thing is, if my memory is correct, the official website for it was a silverlight application, so it didn't exactly survive archiving either https://web.archive.org/web/20091228203449/http://www.micros... the msi download works though.

▲

MangoToupe 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Kind of reminds me of typing pinyin to write chinese.

	▲	eddythompson80 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Minus the short hand you can do there. Also unlike pinyin, there is no standard transliteration of Arabic into Latin characters nor vice verse, which makes reading transliterated Arabic very painful. Everyone just makes up what sounds right to them. You frequently don’t know if you’re reading MSA, Levantine, Egyptian, Gulf, Iraqi, Meghrebi, or Libyan (and that’s not even close to most of them).

▲

skinkestek 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Clicking 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 idioms, but also how ordinary sentences are built different.

(And pointers to resources that do just that would be welcome :-)

	▲	Waraqa 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Are you referring to the language examples in the article? Could you please give an example of what you mean?

▲

stevoski 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The 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.

▲

jhbadger 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltese_language

▲

rafram 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That’s the so-called Arabic chat alphabet, and it’s used across the Arab world. But it isn’t standardized, and everyone writes it differently.

	▲	stavros 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Sounds like greeklish.

▲

tzury 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

مرحبا أهلاً وسهلاً ياحبيبي

لزم تشوف يملي

https://www.yamli.com/editor/ar/

إلين بنكتب في هكر نيوز بالعربي فهمت؟

	▲	tzury 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sherifelmetwally.com

▲

kragen 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Arabic fonts give me such envy. Why can't Latin fonts be so beautiful?

	▲	gavmor 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		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...

▲

Rakshith 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Great so I can understand what the hamas are telling me about their bombing plans on X.

▲

resiros 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Great work. I was expecting to use the informal transliteration keyboard, using 3 for ع or using 2 for ء or 7 for ح

	▲	selmetwa 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I thought about that, but I wanted to support numbers still

▲

anonu 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yamli did this ~20 years ago.

▲

zem 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

your beginning and end of word examples render weirdly here (chrome/android). e.g. byt should be بيت without the squiggle at the beginning

▲

ramyar 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Finglish also so popular in Persian