One of the more surprising features of Jordan is how much there is in English around the streets. In the richer parts of Amman most shops have signage in English, although as you get to the less well off the ratio drops.
However because Arabic is very vague about vowels, with different dialects having different vowels for the same words, the Jordanians seem to find English vowels very difficult. The result is a lot of signs that are hard not to find funny.
The other common error is getting the consonant order reversed. Because they read right to left, so I can imagine a person going "d" before "r" only to get the wrong because "before" has a different direction.
Meanwhile, of course, we recognise one word in Arabic, which is Amman عمّان -- so that we get on the right bus.
It looks hard, but that only goes part of the way, because the Arabs are huge on calligraphy, so they have an enormous number of different scripts in use. They are often quite stylish and beautiful, but do not make it easy for non-Arabic readers.
Different buses will have the name in very different fonts, so it's not just a matter of matching letters with the same shapes. These all say Amman.
But at least it is alphabetic.
However because Arabic is very vague about vowels, with different dialects having different vowels for the same words, the Jordanians seem to find English vowels very difficult. The result is a lot of signs that are hard not to find funny.
A personal favourite is the Condles Hatel in Petra. Their other material is spelled correctly, but someone should definitely have been supervising the person hanging up the sign out front!
The other common error is getting the consonant order reversed. Because they read right to left, so I can imagine a person going "d" before "r" only to get the wrong because "before" has a different direction.
Meanwhile, of course, we recognise one word in Arabic, which is Amman عمّان -- so that we get on the right bus.
It looks hard, but that only goes part of the way, because the Arabs are huge on calligraphy, so they have an enormous number of different scripts in use. They are often quite stylish and beautiful, but do not make it easy for non-Arabic readers.
Different buses will have the name in very different fonts, so it's not just a matter of matching letters with the same shapes. These all say Amman.
But at least it is alphabetic.
No comments:
Post a Comment