Hello, for the weekend, here’s a fun little lesson to help you continue practising reading letters. I’m going to show you some logos from well-known brands that have been “Arabised”. It’s up to you to decipher them!
This will be quite easy, as you will recognise the brand name straight away. But it’s interesting to learn how to recognise letters when they are written slightly differently, and also to understand how Arabic transcribes the Latin alphabet!
Let’s start with a world-famous drink…
Nothing special, except that, as always, in the absence of a true ‘o’ in the Arabic alphabet, we use Waw, و . People can easily tell the difference, and I have never heard anyone say ‘Couca Coula’. Also, at the end, there is a nice لا . The graphic designer has skilfully rendered the slightly unusual appearance of Latin letters in Arabic, while keeping the logo highly legible. The hyphen between the two words, which does not exist in Arabic, has disappeared.
Now for the competition:
Two things to note: as the letter ‘p’ does not exist in Arabic, a Bâ is used instead. It is then a question of local pronunciation. In some countries, the B and P are so similar that “Bacha” became ‘Pacha’ in French.
At the bottom, you have the capacity, with real Arabic numerals. Yes, ‘Arabic’ numerals are not those of the Arabic language, which generally uses ‘European Arabic’ numerals. The further east you go, the more the Arabic version of Arabic numerals is used: in Egypt, for example, it is common to see a telephone number written entirely in Arabic, which is never the case in Morocco. For small numbers, the Arabic version of the numerals is used. And to top it all off, even in Arabic, numbers are read from left to right!
To complicate matters further, there are two versions of Arabic numerals in Arabic: one used in North Africa and one in the Middle East.
The same goes for this two-litre bottle of Fanta. (With the cute spelling mistake on litre, which remains in the singular, and which, incidentally, is written لتر in Arabic, using only consonants). Incidentally, we discover برتقال , which means ‘orange’.
And there you go, a fourth soda (yes, we really like sodas in Muslim countries, where – theoretically – we don’t drink alcohol).
What is interesting here is how difficult it is to read the logo on the left, on the can: the letters are very close together, and the dots are difficult to distinguish. The ‘p’ is again replaced by a Bâ. The “i” is rendered by a diphthong, with an ا followed by a ي , to render the American sound ‘Aïe’. (And the two litres are still in the singular).
Another one?
Here, the vowel is carried by a Ya that comes after Waw. And as usual, the Bâ is used to represent the letter P.
We finish by leaving drinks behind and moving on to sweets. Here is the Arabic version of the Cadbury logo. It is written كادبوري , nothing special in the transcription, but look how the graphic designer has managed to keep the overall shape of the logo!
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