What Would You Do?

Alright people, let's see your different opinions on something fun for a change:

Let's say you and a friend (or more) were eating at a café or restaurant, you had a good meal, the service was not bad and generally it was an OK experience, the bill comes and they've added sales tax, service tax, a cover charge per person and all that's there to add, the bill totaled 18.25 JDs, you hand them a twenty, and they return 1 JD instead of 1.75 ignoring the whole thing

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Do You Speak Arabish?

Picture Source

This post is dedicated to fellow blogger Joyce: your wish, my command my friend :)
*if you’re not Joyce you can still read the post you know.

So I guess a lot of people would like to know how to read “this Arabish language” (Arabic written with Latin letters and numbers), I wish my mom would master it because it takes me ages to write her or dad a text message in Arabic (For those of you who will say “just call her”, this is in cases of meetings, parties and situations where I can’t call). Plus Arabic characters take up more space so a text message can only have 70 characters as opposed to 160 Latin characters.

Anyway, some people use numbers to replace letters that do exist (or are close enough) in English, I don’t like that, I think it makes the written word an eyesore (you know what else is bad for your sight? WrItInG LiKe tHiS, I hAtE iT aNd iT tAkEs mE aGeS tO rEaD iT), back to the point, here’s a list, of course, of the numbers and their uses:

“2” is used instead of the Hamza, or the glottal stop, the best example I found was on Wikipedia: it’s represented by the hyphen in uh-oh! So, if uh-oh was an Arabic expression, it would be written like this: uh2o (usually the h in the end is dropped).

“3” is used instead of the letter Eyn, as in Arabee (Arabic) or 3arabee, and 3eraq (Iraq).

and 3’ (with an apostrophe) represents the letter Ghain, as in Ughneyeh (song) or u3'neyeh, and a lot of people use "gh" instead.

“5” not as popular as the 2 and 3, it’s the substitute of the letter Khaa, similar to a Spanish J, as in Julio (not Hulio), a lot of people just use “kh” instead, for example “sabaah al 5air (khair)” (good morning), some people like to use this: 7’ instead.

“6” also not a very popular one, sometimes used instead of the letter Ta, with a heavy T as in Tareq = 6areq.

“7” is used instead of the letter Haa but with an intense H coming from further down the throat (imagine an English person saying something is hhhhot, kind of) for example, habeebi and habeebti are written like this: 7abeebi or 7abeebti.

“8” is sometimes used instead of Qaaf, a more intense Q, as in 8atar = Qatar but it’s also not that popular.

“9” is used in two different ways, in the Middle East, it’s a heavy S, the letter Saad, as in 9adeeq = sadeeq (friend) while in North Africa (countries like Tunisia and Morocco) it has the same use as the “8” above.

“10” is used… no I’m just kidding, that would be too much now wouldn’t it?

Also, it wouldn’t be unusual to find words without vowels, since short vowels in Arabic are represented by Arabic diacritics: Harakaat (or tashkeel) and they’re not always used because mostly they are there to show the correct pronunciation of the word, for example my name, Rand, is written in Arabic using three letters only, R, N and D. Now how you read a word that is vowelless and unfamiliar is your problem not mine :)

I think these numbers were chosen based on their similarity to the letter they are replacing in Arabic, as you can tell from the pictures.

That’s the best I can do in explaining them, I hope it was helpful. Yeah Joyce?

Do You Watch Syrian TV Series?

I like Syrian TV shows, I find them more realistic than American shows (what with the lack of people jumping off buildings and landing safely, plus in a Syrian show, when you’re shot you’re shot, end of story) and they’re the perfect Ramadan accessory after Salat El Tarawee7 and all the food before that.

The thing is, I don’t know how some directors seem to miss (or ignore) some tiny yet important details, things like women waking up in the morning with every product in the makeup family on their faces, the awful wigs that they make the actors and actresses wear, particularly when they need a blond girl for some role, and close-ups of bad teeth, very bad teeth.

My favorite is when the show’s events take place in the early 20th century or so like Bab Al Haara for example, and everyone in the cast is wearing, let's say, clothes that are suitable for that period of time, females wear long modest dresses, traditional Syrian costumes and veils that cover most of their hair, yet, they have tattooed eyebrows! Now correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think women in the 20s of last century had their eyebrows tattooed, I can turn a blind eye to the sculpted nose and collagen (or whatever it is they inject these days) injected lips, but the tattoos? Can’t they just fake them? They fake moustaches!

Here’s what I’m talking about:

Got something else to share?