flabbergasted Triglot Groupie Latvia Joined 6362 days ago 75 posts - 97 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Latvian Studies: Arabic (classical), French, German, Italian, Spanish, Mandarin, Serbo-Croatian, Catalan, Persian
| Message 1 of 5 14 September 2009 at 10:53pm | IP Logged |
If I need to transcribe a female name ending in 'a' in Arabic, will I transcribe it by
alif or by ta-marbuta? Examples of the name: Anna, Monica, Christina. Thanks in advance!
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Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5605 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes
| Message 2 of 5 14 September 2009 at 11:01pm | IP Logged |
Look here for "Anna":
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070914083919AA 3pqdc
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snoppingasusual Quadrilingual Hexaglot Groupie Lebanon Joined 5573 days ago 49 posts - 65 votes Speaks: Arabic (Egyptian), French*, English*, Arabic (Written)*, Arabic (Levantine)*, Spanish
| Message 3 of 5 17 September 2009 at 1:35am | IP Logged |
Firstly, I would never trust online content. I have visited several sites that attempt to teach you Arabic, and I have found that half of them are absurdly inaccurate. This is not the case in this short Yahoo! question, but I do not advise you to study Arabic online.
Anyway, I did not quite comprehend your question, but here goes my attempt at figuring it out: Anna = آنّـا, Monica = مونيكا, Christina = كريستينا
To translate English names, you just have to know the Arabic alphabet. However, there are some exceptions. Also, آنّـا is the way it is because the removal of the ّ would make it the first person pronoun.
The Arabic ة is used when you make a noun feminine, but that is not the way you translate English names into Arabic, for proper nouns are translated letter by letter, though, some exceptions exist. Here are some examples of the usage of the Arabic ة:
كلبٌ (Dog, chien, perro, masculine), (Dog, chienne, perra, feminine) ٌكلبةٌ
مراهقٌ (Adolescent, adolescent, adolescente, masculine), مراهقةٌ (Adolescent, adolescente, adolescente, feminine)
Good luck with your studies,
Snoppingasusual.
Edited by snoppingasusual on 17 September 2009 at 1:56am
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Al-Malik Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member United Kingdom arabicgenie.com Joined 7140 days ago 221 posts - 294 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, German*, Spanish, Arabic (Written), Dutch, French, Arabic (classical) Studies: Mandarin, Persian
| Message 4 of 5 17 September 2009 at 11:04am | IP Logged |
One thing to notice about translating names into Arabic is that all the vowels in the original name will usually be transcribed as long vowels in the Arabic version. As shoppingasusual rightly points out "Monica" would become "مونيكا" (mooneekaa) even though the "i" in "Monica" is definitely a short vowel in the original and short vowels are not written in Arabic (except for harakaat in some situations).
The reason for this phenomenon (short vowel in original name => long vowel in Arabic name) is that Arabic speakers may not be too familiar with Western names and it would cause confusion to merely write "مونكا" or even "منكا" - some people might not recognize these two as names, let alone be able to pronounce them correctly.
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flabbergasted Triglot Groupie Latvia Joined 6362 days ago 75 posts - 97 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Latvian Studies: Arabic (classical), French, German, Italian, Spanish, Mandarin, Serbo-Croatian, Catalan, Persian
| Message 5 of 5 20 September 2009 at 9:41pm | IP Logged |
Thanks for the responses. Much obliged!
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