Arabic-L:LING:Transliteration of e-chat responses

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Wed 01 May 2002
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-------------------------Directory-------------------------------------

1) Subject:Transliteration of e-chat response
2) Subject:Transliteration of e-chat response
3) Subject:Transliteration of e-chat response

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1)
Date:  01 May 2002
From:Joost Kremers <j.kremers at let.kun.nl>
Subject:Transliteration of e-chat response

I am not sure if the term "standard" would really apply here. I have
seen Egyptians use the Roman alphabet a few times to communicate in
Arabic over the web or via e-mail. Being Egyptians, they wrote
Egyptian Arabic rather than Standard Arabic, and the transliteration
was defective. For example, long vowels were generally not
distinguished from short ones, both ha' and Ha' were transcribed with
the letter `h' (similarly for siin and SaaD and other
non-emphatic/emphatic pairs), `ayn was not normally indicated, etc.

The system is typically developed by and for native speakers, and
obviously serves a purpose to them. The defective nature is not really
a problem for them, because they can easily reconstruct the
distinctions that are missing. But because of this defective nature,
it is unlikely it would be really useful to non-native speakers, and
it would certainly not be suitable for use in a scientific context.

 From a (socio)linguistic point of view, it is a very interesting
phenomenon, of course.

--
Joost Kremers
University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Department of Arabic and Islam

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2)
Date:  01 May 2002
From:Waheed Samy <wasamy at umich.edu>
Subject:Transliteration of e-chat response

 From my experience, I have not seen one standard; I have seen several.
It is not possible that "young Arabs all over the world" who chat on the 
web have one standard at this point in time.
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3)
Date:  01 May 2002
From:mughazy <mughazy at students.uiuc.edu>
Subject:Transliteration of e-chat response

I think that the wide spread of chat rooms, where you cannot use the 
Arabic
script necessitated a transliteration system that everyone can use. The 
system
that I know is pretty simple; you use the English letters for the sounds 
that
are shared by the two languages, and numerals for those that are not in
English. For example, 7 for the voiceless fricative pharyngeal, as in 
wa7id
(one), 7* for the voiceless uvular fricative,2 for the glottal stop 2wwel
(first), 3 for the voiced pharyngeal as in 3arabi (Arabic), and 3* for 
the
voiced uvular fricative 3*arbi (western). Of course there are other 
systems
that use capital letters.

What is even more interesting is why these particular numerals were 
chosen.
There is some symbolic resemblance between these numerals and the Arabic
letters for these sounds. What needs to be investigated is how these
associations were conventionalized and who are the sociolinguistic 
leaders of
change that promoted and standardized their use. Also, you might notice 
that
vowels are not always transcribed accurately because usually there is no
distinction between long and short vowels. The same is observed with
gemination and emphatic consonants. It seems to me that the top-down
strategies of processing that are used in disambiguating Arabic 
homographs is
transferred to these transcription systems.

Here are some examples for a Lebanese chat room. You will see variation 
with a
longer samples.
rod 3alay (answer me)
7amdellah (welcome)
7abebi enta ra'esak awal moseba elna (my dear, your dancing is the first
disater for us)
jeet be wa2tak  (you came at the right time)
Alla la yestor 3aleh

These are from an Egyptian room. Again there are some variations. Also, 
the
final /h/ is encoded even though it is not prominent in natural speech.
yel3ab 	(he plays)
inta 7atta met2a7’ar (you are even late)
shab m3'shoosh (a deceived guy)
allah ya7’dak
enta lessah mat7'ana2tesh

Mustafa A. Mughazy
Graduate student
Depatment of Linguistics
University of Illinois
Urbana Champaign

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End of Arabic-L:  01 May 2002