
Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script - _samihasan_
https://github.com/samihasan/eskendereyya
======
thekid314
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_
>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.

~~~
alirazaq
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 and even native speakers can have trouble
pronouncing new words.

~~~
ue_
>Except romaji isn't used to teach pronunciation

I know, but students will continue to treat it as a pronunciation guide
anyway, unless told specifically how to pronounce otherwise. It's especially
bad when the Japanese is supported by romaji way into the course, which
fosters laziness in the student.

------
wisam
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_
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
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).

------
baudolino
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.

------
cagataygurturk
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.

------
intopieces
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.

------
htns
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)?

------
616c
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_\(programming_language\))

------
anonu
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_
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.

------
sirfz
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.

------
involans
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.

~~~
skellystudios
I've seen it described as the sound or throat action in the middle of "uh
oh!".

I found that kinda useful.

------
Zaheer
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!

------
planteen
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
Come to the middle east. Plenty of English words written in Arabic. McDonald's
and subway immediately come to mind.

~~~
subliminalpanda
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-
ho...](http://cdn.torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/tim-hortons-
oman.jpg)

~~~
_samihasan_
I prefer to write Tim Hortons like this "تِم هُرتُنز" in Arabic but that's
just me.

------
Raed667
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_
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".

------
grzm
Some discussion from a month ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12956885](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12956885)

------
mitchtbaum
You may also like this universal script, Shwa.
[http://shwa.org/](http://shwa.org/)

------
mrkgnao
That sounds like "Alexander". Interesting.

~~~
yoo1I
... not sure how well this system will fare, given that "Eskéndereyya" is
'literally' the arabic name of the city of Alexandria.

~~~
_samihasan_
Just a minor correction, "Eskéndereyya" is Alexandria in Egyptian Arabic not
MSA. In MSA, it's "al Iskándareyya" using this writing system rules.

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

~~~
_samihasan_
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. :)

------
kylehotchkiss
So cool! Language translation standardization projects are great teaching
tools

