Writing Hebrew and Arabic the wrong way

A few weeks ago, I visited the Singapore Night Safari with a friend who was visiting from Australia. We spotted some mugs at the souvenir shop which featured the names of 'popular' animals translated into various languages. Incidentally, this friend of mine is also a speaker of Hebrew, and quickly pointed out the glaring error on all of the mugs.

For those of you who can read Hebrew, it's a very obvious one. The word for lion in Hebrew is אריה (ari) and not הירא. While the makers of this mug have written the Hebrew word using the correct letters, they have failed to realise that unlike English, Hebrew is written from right to left, not left to right. The equivalent of this in English would be like spelling lion as noil.

Similarly, for 'African Elephant', we should have פיל אפּריקני (pil afriykaniy). Here, the word order is also incorrect, which is expected since the writer has gone from left to right, giving us the equivalent of tnahpele nacirfa.

Finally, for the 'Black Rhinoceros' mug, we should expect to see קרנף שחור (karnaf shah'or) - well you can't really see the word for 'black' in the photo, but you can see the word for 'rhino' קרנף karnaf.

Take note that in Hebrew, some letters have different forms depending on whether they occur at the end of a word or not. One example is the letter which represents corresponds to the English letter 'f'. In Hebrew it is written as פּ in the middle of a word, but as ף at the end of a word. On the mug we find the word-final form of this letter right at the end of word, if Hebrew were written from left to right. This suggests that the makers of the mug did not start with a Romanised transliteration of the Hebrew words, but translated them directly into Hebrew written in the Hebrew script (most likely using an online translator). Somehow in the editing process, whether by accident or on purpose, they moved the letters around so that they now go from left to right.

On a similar note, a picture by Bartosz Ostrowski, a Polish photographer and illustrator, has been making the rounds on Tumblr.

(Click here to see the picture.)

A number of commentators have pointed out that the Arabic for 'meow', naw naw has been incorrectly written in the Arabic script. The picture gives ون ون, when it should be نونو. Like the Hebrew script, the Arabic script is also read from right to left. Arabic letters also have different forms depending on whether they occur at the start of the word, in the middle, or at the end, and if they occur in isolation. The mistake in the picture is that the words have been written using the 'isolated' forms of the letters, and written from left to right.

Going back to the animal mugs, I do hope the manufacturers eventually realise their mistake and fix the Hebrew translations. However, given that the mistake was the reason my friend bought one as a souvenir, it may be in their best interests not to correct these errors...