| I'll play devils advocate here. Their solution is too complex and tries to fix a non-problem. For someone learning Arabic the letters are the first of many challenging steps. I learned the Arabic letters in 1 day with flashcards. That single day was easy compared with everything that came afterwards. Using a romanized scripts makes all these subsequent steps with grammar and accents much harder. I can see how this would be helpful in accurately learning new accents, but accents are notoriously inaccurate and flexible, the Arabic letters leave that flexibility, outside of academic text Romanized letters would require so many exceptions that it be like nailing jello to a wall. It would be useful for news organizations if this system was applied across many languages so that we can always spell and pronounce names correctly. The use of non-english keyboard letters creates complexity. I much prefer the use of number replacements for letters that teens use when texting. sa7? |
Thanks for the feedback.
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.