— witsandnuts

As previously mentioned in this post, I am currently taking an Arabic course and that I initially noticed (among other things) that they don’t have letters V and P in the Arabic alphabet. But they have “ba” and “fa”. Hence, instead of pronouncing Gavin as it is read, it becomes “Gafin”, while “pizza” becomes “bizza”, etc. Once you observed the pattern, you can easily adjust with the pronunciation part. But writing in Arabic is absolutely a different (and challenging) area.

Off the class, I had a not so ordinary yet funny conversation with some colleagues:

Canadian: Recently I was in Domino’s Pizza and I tried to practice my Arabic and I ordered, “One chicken b-izza, please!” Oh my, I’m good.

Me: Haha. I’ll try, too, next time.

Indian: I’ll try to speak in Arabic when I’m in the airplane (pronounced as “er-plane”) soon.

Canadian: You say, apple.

Indian: E-pol

Canadian: Hmmmm…

Me: Maybe, you don’t have A in your Urdu.

Canadian: Yeah

Indian: We have. It’s just that my English is British.

Canadian: Same here. But I can say “A”. Wits, what’s your English?

Me: I speak both American and British English. But most of the time, it’s American. Automatically becomes British when I watch Harry Potter (LOL).

Canadian: Yeah, I think.

Indian: (points to the Canadian) But you hardly know how to accent on aaa and ooo and iiii properly.

Canadian: Okay… (laughs)

Indian: (points to me) I think Filipino alphabet has no letter F. I met a Filipino and he kept on saying “Por you, Por you…”

Me: (Smiled) There is, of course. But P and F are interchanged by some “rarely”, same with V with B.

So on.

We were like kids that kept on discussing the lingual limitations of each nationality. We, therefore, concluded that there’s no such thing as incomplete alphabet, even for the Arabic. Needless to say, no tongue is too perfect.