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Sunday, July 19, 2009

My Name ... Arabic-style

I have found a use for my new-found Arabic language skills: I discovered yesterday that I can read my name in Arabic! I was very curious about the fact that there is no sound for the letter 'p' in Arabic ... so how were they spelling it???

The obvious difference between Arabic and English is the direction of the script, right-to-left versus left-to-right but this was surprsingly easy to overcome. The capital letter comes at the end of the word and not the beginning, also not too difficult. The biggest challenge though, everyday written Arabic does not generally bother with the vowels (the slashes and squiggles above and below the script) so its a bit hard to tell exactly what Arabic words should sound like unless you already know the word. So purely based on my vehicle registration card (without vowels), this is my name:

b-ee-n-ee-l-A
n-oo-r-ee-N
z-oo-l-n-ee-R

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