Show HN: Writing Arabic in English
sherifelmetwally.comA 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.
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.
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.
Kind of reminds me of typing pinyin to write chinese.
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).
Great work. I was expecting to use the informal transliteration keyboard, using 3 for ع or using 2 for ء or 7 for ح
مرحبا أهلاً وسهلاً ياحبيبي
لزم تشوف يملي
https://www.yamli.com/editor/ar/
إلين بنكتب في هكر نيوز بالعربي فهمت؟
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sherifelmetwally.com
Yamli did this ~20 years ago.