How do you mean? That they’re using the wrong letter?
Sure, but would غranada be as immediately legible to a non-Arabic speaker? Maybe? It reminds of how, in English at least, whenever someone wants to make something look Russian they throw in the letter Я, but as if it were simply a backwards R.Yes. It shouldn't be so difficult to find out which letter the Arabic version of the name starts with.
I might also be biased in that qaf is pronounced like a g in the varieties of spoken Arabic I’m most familiar with.It seems to me that غ looks close enough to a g, especially in this context. But I may be biased.
It seems Egyptian Arabic does have its own variant, so maybe...?unless there are variants?
Oh yes, because Egyptians pronounce ج as g.
All I can tell you is that Egyptian Arabic is the American English of the Arab world: everybody is familiar with it and is saturated by its media. There was also historically some promotion of Egyptian Arabic as a form of opposition to the Ottomans and later, European colonial powers. I don't know if this still pertains, and might have been at odds with Nasser's pan-Arabism. I remember one Saudi student who spoke scathingly of any attempt to accord Egyptian Arabic (or any non-Classical Arabic) the status of a proper language. I also remember a Hejazi guy telling how his mother tried modify her speech to sound more Egyptian when talking to anyone who wasn't a native speaker of Arabic, so maybe some people have a perception that it's more comprehensible. To me, Hejazi Arabic already shares a lot of phonetic characteristics with (Cairene) Egyptian Arabic (the pronunciation of qaf not being one of them), but grammatically and lexically I don't think they're particularly alike.It's a pity more dialects aren't available on Wiki so I could check if any uses a qaf in that name. By the way, is there something special about Egyptian Arabic to make it deserve its own Wikipedia when the rest of the Arab world is, it seems, content with the MSA version?
Interesting! I don’t think صندوق can mean a square on a piece of paper, nor had I ever understood ’think outside the box’ that wayI'm curious to know if صندوق can mean a square on a piece of paper as the word box does in "think outside the box," or does it only mean a literal three-dimensional box?
Egypt has been home for decades to this atheist/nationalist movement that promotes the use of dialects over MSA, and the status of Egyptian Arabic as the only legitimate official language of Egypt. I believe the Egyptian wiki is largely written by its proponents.Or something special about Egyptians, for that matter (e.g. being more open to linguistic variation, or more nationalistic).
!I am in Riyadh right now
How biased what?Or how biased
How long since you had last been there? I had an apartment on Olaya, across from the Aziziya Mall in Muruj, from 2009-2012, which at the time was practically the outer edge of the city. I went back in 2015 briefly and this was definitely no longer the case.I am in Riyadh right now, it's unbelievable how much it seems to have change.
Oops I was Riyadh 3 months ago and this was probably a draft of a post I never completed. Didn't notice it was still there when I posted last night. I can't remember what I intended to say!
How biased what?