Show HN: Writing Arabic in English

(sherifelmetwally.com)

24 points | by selmetwa 2 days ago ago

5 comments

  • kdaker 2 hours ago

    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.

  • ls-a 2 hours ago

    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.

    • eddythompson80 5 minutes ago

      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.

    • MangoToupe an hour ago

      Kind of reminds me of typing pinyin to write chinese.

      • eddythompson80 21 minutes ago

        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).