Fingilish
Fingilish, Pinglish, Penglish or Fargelisi (a portmanteau word formed from Persian + English, or Farsi + English) is the way Persian words are written using the Latin alphabet (as opposed to the Persian alphabet), or generally the casual romanization of Persian words popularized after computers, emailing and online chat became ubiquitous. This type of writing is commonly used in online chat, emails and SMS. It developed and spread due to a former lack of software supporting the Persian alphabet, and/or due to a lack of knowledge about the software that was available. Although Persian writing is supported in recent operating systems, there are still many cases where the Persian alphabet is unavailable and there is a need for an alternative way to write Persian with the Latin alphabet.
The following table contains some examples of romanized Persian words and the ways they are used by Persian chat users.
| Fingilish | Persian | English |
|---|---|---|
| Dorud | درود | hello |
| amadan | آمدن | to come |
| parvaz | پرواز | flight |
| sakhtar | ساختار | structure |
| ghamus | قاموس | manifest |
There is software to help transliterate from Fingilish to Persian and vice versa. For example, Google has added a page to its Google Transliteration set that can be used to transliterate from Fingilish into Persian script. There are also communities and message groups for Fingilish on some famous websites like Facebook.
Social Acceptance
Writing Fingilish is often considered bad style among Persian speakers, and is confined to (very) informal communication. It is considered to be highly inappropriate to write official or polite messages in Fingilish; this reaches the point that, when there is no way to write the Persian alphabet, communication occurs directly in English rather Fingilish.
Uses of Fingilish are often confined to mobile messaging, including SMS, messaging apps as well as online messaging programs. The use of the portmaneu language has lessened in recent years as more mobile phones offer Persian keyboards and users are no longer subjected to Arabic keyboards which miss letters.
Equivalency of letters
The table below shows how the Latin alphabet is used to transliterate the Persian language.
Table of equivalency of letters in Fingilish:
| Persian | Fingilish |
|---|---|
| آ،ا | a (aa) |
| ب | b |
| پ | p |
| ت | t |
| ث | s |
| ج | j |
| چ | ch |
| ح | h |
| خ | kh (x) |
| د | d |
| ذ | z |
| ر | r |
| ز | z |
| ژ | zh(j) |
| س | s |
| ش | sh |
| ص | s |
| ض | z |
| ط | t |
| ظ | z |
| ع،ء | `, ae, ea |
| غ | gh |
| ف | f |
| ق | q |
| ک | k |
| گ | g |
| ل | l |
| م | m |
| ن | n |
| و | o,u, v |
| ه | h |
| ی | i,y |
See also
External links
- behnevis.com. Interactive web based Persian transliterator
- eMonshi.com. Interactive web based Persian transliterator
- En2Fa. Pingilish into Persian translator program
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