By Carl Kenner
The first word is "il" meaning "the", which you will remember I said joins onto the start of the following word. It says "I L B Y T Z I". The Y is the "ee" sound here. So the second word is "bytza". Unlike the "Alif" at the beginning of the word, the Alif on the end is always going to be the "ah" sound. I’m sure you remember that il bytza means the pizza in Arabic. Don’t forget that it’s spelt and pronounced T Z in Arabic. In English it’s pronounced like T S.
The Egyptian Arabic word for book is kitaab (aa means the ah sound).
The Egyptian Arabic word for kebab is kebaab.
The Egyptian Arabic word for bank is bank.
The Arabic letter K looks kind of like the right hand side of a letter K, , without the stalk on the left hand side. So it just looks like a less-than sign. But it has a cursive line underneath it, linking it to the letter before and the letter after. This makes it look like an English letter S with a flat bottom and an angular top. But the S is in fact a K.
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But at the end of a word or when it can’t link to the next letter, it does something really strange! At the end of the word it is written inside a big Arabic letter L. So it looks like a backwards L with an S inside. But it is still a K. The L is just a flourishy tail that the K hides inside of.
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So what are these words?
الكتاب