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.
Well, I must say that I fail to see the rationale of this argument as I speak other European languages and I haven't encountered this problem before.
The mental process goes like this; I identify the language of text let's say Spanish and then like a switch in my brain is turned on for the Spanish pronunciation and then I proceed to read the text using the rules of the Spanish language while English is totally disabled.
This is not like unique to me as I observed other students with the same process. I can't really say that the issue you described is a universal issue for all language learners worldwide.
The comparison of Arabic with Russian is not sound as Arabic is written with diacritics which in and of itself is a big plus if you're a native speaker or an experienced one but not so for inexperienced or novice speakers while Russian to my understanding is more explicit about that part.
I might disagree with your characterization that the problem I'm addressing here as a non-problem as writing systems are there for a reason and so is mine.
Eskéndereyya doesn't tackle the problem of Arabic letters memorization as this is a very simple problem to crack. It instead addresses pronunciation and reading and to a lesser degree writing as you may know that the common way to write and serve text in Arabic is without diacritics, and for this reason, it becomes hard for beginners to practice and improve their skills without aid and this is where I envisioned Eskéndereyya to fill the gap.
I'm not sure what you're trying to convey with the part of accents in your comment. Are you referring to Arabic regional dialects/languages?
Re complexity, doing nothing will always be less costly that doing something in terms of energy and effort but this point of view overlooks the gains or return expected on the energy expended, and if the return turns out to greater than the costs, the endeavor is determined to be profitable and vice versa.
So, you may think that this layer of complexity is unnecessary but I will take your word "sa7" as an example to prove how I think otherwise.
"sa7" is "صح" in colloquial Arabic but it's still ambiguous and confusing as the letter "s" in Arabizi can mean both "س" or "ص" depending on context but when the word is transliterated as "šaħ", the ambiguity disappears with no room to error.
You might counter and say that there's no "سح" in Arabic but there actually is but it's less common since it's slang but featured in a well-known old Egyptian folk song titled "essaħ eddaħ embú السح الدح امبو"
To summarize, there's always a trade-off and it's up to you to decide which you to go.
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. :)
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.
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".
I agree with you completely and I even developed an open -source writing system called Eskéndereyya [1] to help learners of Arabic in reading and pronunciation and to prepare them to make the jump to the Arabic script very confidently because I noticed that some beginners are put off by the notion of learning a completely new script just to read and write few sentences and when taking into account how usually Arabic is communicated in writing without diacritics, it becomes very frustrating for them to get any immediate return for their efforts to learn the language.
She just crammed the Semitic sounds in a few made up words sparkled by some real Arabic words and that's it but she should have been making more effort in imitating the rhythm and intonation (prosody) [1] to fool the native Arabic speaker ears that what she speaks was actually Arabic.
Eskéndereyya doesn't only support MSA but other regional derivative languages/dialects like Egyptian and Syrian Arabic. Also, it would be a good idea to refresh your memory and test your knowledge of the language.
I agree with you that the Arabic script is and will always be better for writing Arabic texts but this writing system was developed to fill the gap for beginners and as a stepping stone to the full experience of learning Arabic.
If they manage to reach 99% translation accuracy of German texts, I say they achieved a very remarkable feat.
I know that Modern Standard Arabic is not supported yet with the NML system but I just went and tried the translation for a small excerpt from an article on DW [1]
"بالرغم من عدم وجود تأكيدات رسمية منها على نيتها للترشح مجددا، قال قيادي بارز في حزبها إن المستشارة ميركل ستترشح لولاية رابعة. جاء ذلك على لسان المسؤول عن لجنة العلاقات الخارجية في البرلمان الألماني نوربرت روتغن. "
"Despite the lack of official confirmation, including the intention to run again, a senior leader of her party said that Chancellor Merkel will stand for a fourth term. This came on the tongue in charge of the Foreign Relations Committee in the German Parliament Norbert Rongn."
Of course, the translation is not perfect but good enough. However, I believe that they could do better by working on their Arabic text-to-speech synthesizer and having a toggle option for diacritics that would definitely help them with the synthesizer as there are many words pronounced wrong or actually very wrong that's disappointing.
All in all, great work by the people at Google Translate.
I developed "Eskéndereyya", a comprehensive writing system of Arabic in Latin alphabet to help Arabic learners esp. beginners to improve their reading and writing skills in Arabic without the immediate need to be familiar with the Arabic script.
I am not really familiar with romanization schemes of the Japanese language. So, I can't really comment on the specific point you raised but I'm familiar with other schemes of Arabic and most are lacking or cumbersome to use esp. for beginners.
The raison d'etre for my project is bridging the gap that Arabic learners esp. beginners face when they explore the language and how's mastering Arabic script whether in reading or writing is asking too much from them at that stage and how's that affects their learning journey very negatively.
This learning curve is just too steep for them and I really wanted to help them to make the first steps to learn the language without the unneeded complexity and like I said on the introduction part, Arabic script is not going anywhere and they have to get acquainted with it very closely if they are serious about learning the language but too early in my opinion could be counter-productive for them.
Eskéndereyya is not a substitute or competitor for IPA or any other fully-featured pronunciation or romanization system. Like I said in the "Design Philosophy", it has "just enough" academic rigor to get the job done. For people who want more academic rigor and comprehensiveness, they're advised to check other systems for review.
This is Sami. I developed this comprehensive writing system of Arabic in Latin alphabet to help Arabic learners esp. beginners to improve their reading and writing skills in Arabic without the immediate need to be familiar with the Arabic script.
Please try it out and let me know what you think in the comments below.
Governments too should be proactive if they really care about the safety, security and privacy of their citizenry and start enacting laws and regulations that protect the rights of people to have secure communications but the problem is that some governments or agencies benefit from this situation and want to keep it this way the longest time possible and leave consumers at the mercy of operators like Facebook or Google.
I hope that this is not inappropriate but I'm just wondering if you could disable the ghosting of the submission of my GitHub repo here github dot com slash samihasan slash eskendereyya
I think that this submission would be very helpful for the community here.
I hope that this is not inappropriate but I'm just wondering if you could disable the ghosting of the submission of my GitHub repo here github[.]com[/]samihasan[/]eskendereyya
I think that this submission would be very helpful for the community here.