Show HN: Writing Arabic in English
sherifelmetwally.com
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.
sherifelmetwally.com
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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
They have a popular and simple system for writing Arabic in Latin, with numerals stepping in for certain Arabic letters.
لزم تشوف يملي
https://www.yamli.com/editor/ar/
إلين بنكتب في هكر نيوز بالعربي فهمت؟