![]() ![]() I've always tried to understand the song, which eventually led me to discussion forums discussing the lyrics and meaning. Of course, the verses seem to be infinite. One of the earliest versions was performed by Nazem al-Ghazali, but there are others by Sabah Fakhri, Ilham al-Madfai, Kazem el-Saher and many others. It originated in Iraq and quickly spread throughout the Arabic world with the advent of radio and television. "Fog al-Nakhel (فوق النخل)" is one of the most famous Arabic songs. See my two transliterations of the same song below as an example.We've translated many an Arabic folk song here on the blog performed by various artists, but the discussion on this song is so massive and the versions so numerous that it deserves its own post. And that's why some translators on here, myself included, are usually gladly willing to provide a different transliteration style when someone requests it. So it's up to the translator to choose which one they use. ![]() However, as you are already aware, they are unreadable for people who are not familiar with Arabic or the Arabic chat language.Īs a result, the general consensus on the website between Arabic content editors/mods is that both transliteration styles are accepted (the ones with and without Arabic chat language). One final note, it is true that the numbers make transliterations way more accurate for Arabic speakers/learners. Also towards the end 'H' and 'SH' are included, those are sounds that already exist in English and are irrelevant to the Arabic chat language. Note that the GH in the video should be written as 3'. Here is a video below that shows the letters with examples of how they sound in some Arabic words. I'll list them below so you can observe that.ģ -> ع (very specific sound, check vid below) Also it's true that the choice of numbers comes because of the visual similarity between the Arabic letters and most of those numbers chosen. The idea indeed is that there are a bunch of letters/sounds in Arabic that don't exist in other languages like English. Native Arabic speaker here, I agree with pretty spot on. Wait for the input of a native speaker to have a confirmation or to understand this better. Plus the goal of a transliteration is not to make a language clearer to those who don't know it, but to put it in another context (this happens for various reasons). I understand it's hard to read this kind of transliteration (I'm the first who has no idea what they stand for), but for learners and natives it makes way more sense. That said, take my words with a grain of salt, a native speaker can easily disagree.Īs far as I know, using numbers for an Arabic speaker is way simpler than using diacritics or other letters for two reasons: the shape of some Arabic letters look like these numbers (don't forget that the number system we've all learnt in school is called Indo-Arabic because it was created in India and developed by Arabs) and because some represent sounds that are hard to transliterate using the Latin alphabet. I'm not an arabic speaker, but I know one thing or two about this phenomenon. ![]()
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