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ajnabiehI finally finished posting all my Cairo photos to Flickr; have at. I haven't written notes on each of them, but I'll go back and do that now. No promises as to them being particularly excellent photos...
As I was uploading, I found another "language is cool!" moment. Remember my post from back in the day about English written in Arabic letters? I found a great example that complicates that:
This is a bakery on a side street in Mohandessin, called "Le Gourmet" in Latin letters on one side, and لو جورميه on the other. The Arabic here is great, because it's clearly working directly from the French, rather than via another language. Here we have the ج represents /g/ phenominon, the idea that the word ends in an /h/, and, most interesting to me, writing the vowel of the word "le" using the و, which we usually write as a u in English. I'd write the underlying French vowel as a /ʌ/, I think--and given that Arabic only has three long vowels (and long vowels are preferred for transliteration from other languages, to reduce ambiguity), u is probably a better choice than a or i. Still, though, not where I would have gone, with a more orthographic and less sound-based transliteration plan.
As I was uploading, I found another "language is cool!" moment. Remember my post from back in the day about English written in Arabic letters? I found a great example that complicates that:
This is a bakery on a side street in Mohandessin, called "Le Gourmet" in Latin letters on one side, and لو جورميه on the other. The Arabic here is great, because it's clearly working directly from the French, rather than via another language. Here we have the ج represents /g/ phenominon, the idea that the word ends in an /h/, and, most interesting to me, writing the vowel of the word "le" using the و, which we usually write as a u in English. I'd write the underlying French vowel as a /ʌ/, I think--and given that Arabic only has three long vowels (and long vowels are preferred for transliteration from other languages, to reduce ambiguity), u is probably a better choice than a or i. Still, though, not where I would have gone, with a more orthographic and less sound-based transliteration plan.