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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
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.
mcswell|5 months ago
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|5 months ago
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.
cenamus|5 months ago
kdaker|5 months ago
ls-a|5 months ago
eddythompson80|5 months ago
MangoToupe|5 months ago
skinkestek|5 months ago
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|5 months ago
stevoski|5 months ago
They have a popular and simple system for writing Arabic in Latin, with numerals stepping in for certain Arabic letters.
jhbadger|5 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltese_language
rafram|5 months ago
tzury|5 months ago
لزم تشوف يملي
https://www.yamli.com/editor/ar/
إلين بنكتب في هكر نيوز بالعربي فهمت؟
tzury|5 months ago
kragen|5 months ago
gavmor|5 months ago
resiros|5 months ago
selmetwa|5 months ago
anonu|5 months ago
zem|5 months ago
ramyar|5 months ago
Rakshith|5 months ago