The Arabic Language With A Latin Alphabet

Anyone watching from Malta?

It's not strange for them to say Allah as Christians. Middle Eastern Christian communities all say Allah when speaking Arabic. It's simply the Arabic word for God.

On the flip side, Farsi, the language of Iran, is an Indo-European language (so the same family as Hindi, English, Russian, etc) that uses the Arabic script.

Imagine if instead of Spanish people spamming ñ everywhere, the Maltese spammed ħ everywhere.

The allah thing is interesting because in spanish there's the word "ojala" (If god allows) which stayed from arabic.

Arab teams in competitive eSports write standard Arabic with latin alphabet replacing absent letters with arabic numerals like ain (عين) being replaced with 3.

This was quite interesting. In Latin-America we still use Arabic loaned words in our Spanish too! This is because Spain reconquered their land from the Muslim kingdom before colonizing Spanish speaking Latin-America resulting in a similar phenomenon of Latin written Arabic with the a Spanish pronunciation being spread across our foreign nations. Examples of this being: Alacrán=scorpion, aceité=cooking oil, Azúcar=Sugar, Camisa=Shirt, arroz=rice, jirafa=giraffe, Taza=mug, Ojalá=Hopefully/Godwilling:)

Fun fact: Sicilians from Italy and Iberians (Spain + Portugal) used to speak a form of Arabic as well before the 12th century

Cyrillic is also used for a ton of different languages. Latin alphabet isn’t the only one that does it. It’s just the most known to be. Arabic used to represent a bunch of langu in Africa and Asia before the introduction of the Latin script

There was a sister language of Maltese spoken on the nearby island of Pantelleria (now administered by Sicily). While it went extinct in the seventeenth century, it left an impact both on the local dialect and on place names, the latter ones don't look at all Italian

maltese is a different language, although it did come from an arabic dialect, it diverged so much it became different language all together. there is lots of english and italian loanwords in maltese.

I'm Lebanese, and it's incredible how I passively understand Maltese. In fact, my mom works at a university department dedicated to teaching Arabic, and at one point, she had a Maltese student. They were talking in her office, when she had to take a phone call (in Arabic, of course). Said student told her that he understood what she had said, and so they carried on talking, she in Arabic and he in Maltese. Anyway, I'd love to visit Malta someday. Not only does it look beautiful, but I would definitely have a nice time linguistically.

Also some Belorussian Tatars written Belorussian in arabic script.

Tunisian that now lives in australia here. Maltese is really easy to understand for me. Since, as I grew up learning french and english as well as my native Arabic, I can pick up on the words of latin origin in maltese and understand the sentences. Just to be honest sounds a bit like the libyan italian-arabic creole I used to hear Libyans sometimes speaking (I lived right on the border with Libya)

I didn't know the physical reduced Plank's constant was actually a letter in an actual script for an actual natural language.

And the Latin alphabet comes from the ancient Greek alphabet, which was adapted from the Phoenician alphabet. Carthaginian was Phonecian. Carthage was a Phoenician colony which took over most of their overseas Empire, when Tyre was conquered. There are also extant European languages written in Hebrew, and there were versions of Spanish written in Arabic.

There is also a few things left over from French rule in Maltese like the greeting ‘Bongu’.

"mediteranian meets arabic can't be found in any other place." The Levant: Am I a joke to you?

a lot of people have the assumption that because of the geographical divide (among other things) of the Mediterranean Sea, us Sicilians and the North Africans are vastly different cultures, and Malta is where they mix somewhat. The reality is that the central Mediterranean region is more homogenous than you'd believe, not in spite of the Sea that divides us, but because of the Sea uniting us. People have been crossing the Mediterranean and trading for millennia and if you come to Mazara del Vallo, to Tunis and to Valletta, you'll find out just how many similarities there are.

We use a lot of arabic terms in our translation of Catholicism not just Alla. For example "randan" (lent), "għid" (easter), "tqarbin" (holy communion), "qrar" (reconciliation), "żwieġ" (marriage), "magħmudija" (baptism), etc.