Table Of ContentA Practical Guide for
Elyssa Alphabet
A Latin Script to teach Tunisian
Arabic for young Diaspora
Ramzi Hachani, Houcemeddine Turki
1
Abstract:
Taken into consideration that Maltese is developed from Tunisian
Arabic, it is clearly seen that Maltese Latin Script orthography is the
most appropriate one for Tunisian Arabic. It will be not
consequently useful to try to create a new Latin Script orthography
for Tunisian and forget about the existence of an efficient Latin
Script orthography that is issued from 500 years of important
linguistic research.
In this practical guide, we adapt the Maltese Latin Script
orthography to create our Elyssa writing method in order to be used
to teach Tunisian Arabic for young Tunisian Diaspora that is not
familiar with common Arabic Script.
Keywords:
Maltese, Tunisian Arabic, Latin Script, Orthography
2
Introduction:
Nowadays, many children of Tunisian descent are born in
Europe and North America each year as over one million
Tunisian people are living there (Office of Tunisians abroad,
2012; INSEE, 2011). These children are always using European
languages and the Latin Script in Education and daily contact.
So, it will be difficult and useless for them to learn Arabic
Script as they will only use it for learning Tunisian Arabic, the
Arabic dialect of their parents. Consequently, these children
will not learn efficiently to communicate in Tunisian Arabic
and they will unfortunately never get in touch with their close
relatives in Tunisia…
That is why I think that developing a Latin Script for Tunisian
would help these children learn to speak this Arabic dialect.
This Latin Writing System should be as phonetic as possible
and absolutely simplified so that it can be easily used in
practice to read books and works in Tunisian Arabic (Karan,
2006; Robinson & Gadelii, 2003). In fact, it is useless to let this
Latin orthography get influenced by the Modern Standard
Arabic morphology and orthography as these students would
not use it to learn the etymology of the dialect (Karan, 2006;
Robinson & Gadelii, 2003).
Before 2015, there were several trials to use Latin Script for
Tunisian (Stumme, 1896; Jourdan, 1937; Inglefield, 1970;
Canamas, Neyreneuf, & Villet, 2009). However, they had not
been widely adopted because they did not involve precise
orthographic guidelines or because they had confusing ones.
I think that this is intuitive as a Writing System should be
adjusted several times so that it can be simpler and practical.
However, this is not what happened for these ones.
I also think that they spent their time on doing something
useless. In fact, Maltese linguists have spent 500 years to
succeed in developing a simple Latin Script for their language
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that was originally developed from Tunisian Arabic (Borg &
Azzopardi-Alexander, 1997). Nowadays, this developed Latin
Script Writing System is practical, has precise orthographic
guidelines and made teaching Maltese easier (Borg &
Azzopardi-Alexander, 1997). It will be absurd if we do not use
it in writing Tunisian. That is why I decided to adapt it to
Tunisian Arabic in order to create an efficient writing system
that was entitled “Elyssa Alphabet” in 2015 after my child
who lives abroad since her early childhood, likes to learn the
dialect of her father but finds difficulties to learn it with the
Arabic Script. What had also encouraged me is the success of
Le petit Nicolas en arabe maghrébin in France (Goscinny &
Sempé, 2013; Lazaridis, 2013). In fact, Caubet in this book has
applied Maltese orthography guidelines on Maghrebi Arabizi
and has succeeded to let Arabizi transcription more
intelligible and practical for Maghrebi speakers (Goscinny &
Sempé, 2013).
In this brief booklet, I will try to give an overview about the
guidelines of this new writing system and I will provide
practical examples of the application of this method to
samples in Tunisian Arabic.
Ramzi Hachani
New York, Saturday 12 March 2016
Acknowledgements:
I have to thank reviewers (Tunisians and non-Tunisians,
linguists and non-specialists) for their useful comments. I
have also to thank Dr. Ferid Chekili for his useful and precise
proposals to adjust the structure of this new writing system
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Letters:
As explained, Elyssa Latin Script writing system is based on
Maltese Alphabet and Writing system. It is evident that Elyssa
Alphabet will include all the graphemes of the Maltese one.
That is why it involves 4 borrowed graphemes (ċ, ġ, ħ, ż)
further than the basic Latin Script (Borg & Azzopardi-
Alexander, 1997). As there are some phonemes that have
been dropped from Maltese and that still exist in Tunisian
Arabic (Borg A. , 1997) and as there are some phonemes that
are represented by digraphs (Borg & Azzopardi-Alexander,
1997), we have chosen to assign a grapheme with a diacritic
for each of them to avoid reading difficulties. The first
preference in choosing diacritics of these graphemes will be
always given to the stroke diacritic because it is attached to
the character and by that it is the most easily recognizable
diacritic for readers (Wedekind & Wedekind, 1997).
1. Consonants:
During over 500 years of development, [ð], [sˤ], [ʔ],
[θ] and [tˤ] had disappeared from Maltese (Borg A. ,
1997; Fabri, 2010). However, they still exist and are
commonly used in Tunisian Arabic (Chekili, 1982).
That is why we assigned four graphemes (respectively
đ, ṡ, `, c and ŧ) to them.
Affricates are not very common in Tunisian (Ben
Farah, 2008). However, Maltese has borrowed [t ʃ],
[dʒ ] and [d z] from Italian and represents them
respectively as ċ, ġ and z. So, we decided to use ċ, z
and ż (originally used for [z]) to respectively represent
[ʃ], [z] and [ðˤ] that are not represented in Maltese
(Borg & Azzopardi-Alexander, 1997; Borg A. , 1997).
We had also decided to transcribe [ʕ] as ġ instead of
the Maltese għ digraph as there are some words in
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Tunisian that involve [għ] within them like [għir] (to
frown).
We have chosen to represent [ʁ] as ɍ instead of the
gh digraph that is commonly used in Tunisian Latin
writing systems to avoid its confusion with [gh] that is
used as a nomadic pronunciation of [qh] in Tunisian
Arabic (Baccouche, Skik, & Attia, 1969).
As [ʃ] is represented as ċ, x will be used to represent
[χ]. We represented [ʒ] as j and We have chosen to
represent [j] as y and not j so that the letters would
be more intuitive.
Equivalent
Upper Lower in Arabic
case (Borg case (Borg script
& & (Habash,
Azzopardi- Azzopardi- Soudi, & IPA
Alexander, Alexander, Buckwalter, (Chekili, Pronunciation in English
Nb. 1997) 1997) Name 2007) 1982) Example and other languages
s`il
[sʔil]
1 ` ` hemze ء /ʔ/ ’he asked’ button (English RP)
lbèbe
[lbɛ:bɛ]
2 B b be ب /b/ ‘crumb’ back
bàba
[bˤɑ:bˤɑ]
‘my
[bˤ] father’
[p] bxùr
[pχu:r]
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‘incense’
cùm
[θu:m]
3 C c ce ث /θ/ ‘garlic’ thin
ċibbèk
[ʃib:ɛ:k]
4 Ċ ċ ċìn ش /ʃ/ ‘window’ sheep
ċarċùr
[ʃˤɑrʃu:r]
[ʃˤ] ‘gravel’
debbùze
[dɛb:u:zɛ]
5 D d dèl د /d/ ‘bottle’ dash
rqadt
[rqɑt:]
[t] ‘I slept’
đèb
[ðɛ:b]
6 Đ đ đèl ذ /ð/ ‘it melted’ then
fèriɍ
[fɛ:riʁ]
7 F f fe ف /f/ ‘empty’ fill
fżìħa
[vðˤi:ħɑ]
[v] ‘scandal’
7
gamra
[ɡɑmrɑ]
8 G g gèf ق /ɡ/ ‘moon’ good
Ġarbi
[ʕɑrbi]
9 Ġ ġ ġìn ع /ʕ/ ‘Arab’ ravn (Danish)
hizz
[hiz:]
10 H h he ه /h/ ‘lift!’ high
rabbaħhe
[rɑb:ɑħ:ɛ]
‘he made
[ħ] her win’
ħill
[ħil:]
11 Ħ ħ ħa ح /ħ/ ‘open!’ hat (English RP)
jìb
[ʒi:b]
12 J j jìm ج /ʒ/ ‘bring!’ vision
karkar
[kɑrkɑr]
13 K k kèf ك /k/ ‘drag!’ kiss
lbis
[lbis]
14 L l lèm ل /l/ ‘he wore’ let
8
laħħ
[lˤɑħ:]
‘he
[lˤ] insisted’
mektùb
[mɛktu:b]
15 M m mìm م /m/ ‘destiny’ mother
qàm
[qɑ:mˤ]
‘he stood
[mˤ] up’
neggiz
[nɛɡ:iz]
16 N n nùn ن /n/ ‘jump!’ nice
tinbri
[timbri]
‘post
[m] stamp’
nqarri
[ŋqɑr:i]
[ŋ] ‘I teach’
nlaṡṡaq
[l:ɑsˤ:ɑq]
[l] ‘I stick’
nrìgil
[r:i:ɡil]
[r] ‘I fix’
9
piscine
[pisi:n]
‘swimming
17 P p pe ب /p/ pool’ Pool
qaŧŧùs
[qɑtˤ:u:s]
18 Q q qàf ق /q/ ‘cat’ back (Irish English)
rbìġ
[rbi:ɑ ]
19 R r ra ر /r/ ‘spring’ terra (Italian)
rṡàṡ
[rˤsˤɑ:sˤ]
[rˤ] ‘lead’
Ɍabra
[ʁɑbrɑ]
20 Ɍ ɍ ɍìn غ /ʁ/ ‘dust’ rester (French)
sebb
[sɛb:]
‘he
21 S s sìn س /s/ insulted’ sand
ħusd
[ħuzd]
[z] ‘envy’
qàs
[qɑ:sˤ]
‘he
[sˤ] measured’
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