Rich language, poor language

I'm not saying Arabic isn't a rich language. It's probably just as rich as Sindhi, or Igbo, or English, or Korean. But not to the people who speak it natively. To them it's linguistic wealth is endlessly referred to in conversation. Since this wealth appears to be such a given, I have a suggestion:

Use some of that wealth to purchase a few more letters of the alphabet.

(I'm not going to get into technical details about the difference between letters and sounds, mostly because I'm probably one of three people living in the UAE who would be able to do that and I don't really relish increasing the likelihood ratio of you being able to figure out who I am and what I do for a living. So I'll just talk about letters.)

One of my new pastimes, now that I can sort of read Arabic script, is walking around town with my husband reading signs. He doesn't read the signs -- he just laughs out loud while I'm doing so. It's kind of like a scene out of Rain Man, except in Arabic.

This morning's adventure took us from one end of the island to the other, so there was plenty of raw material for me to practise on. For example, a well-known fast-food chain.

(Burger) كنج

That's k-n-j, unfortunately, so we have something like "Burger Kinge" (would you eat there?). And although the speed of my husband's turkebak prevented me from seeing the first word, I'm pretty sure it was something like:

برجر

In other words, "burdger." And a quick check on the chain's UAE website confirms my suspicion:

We've already been over the problem's that arise from the lack of a /p/ sound (Peter --> Beater, for example), so I won't elaborate further on that here, except for the fact that I personally know three Peters in Abu Dhabi and they all have business cards that say "Beater."

Some of you, particularly if you happen to be an expert in some useless field like linguistics, are thinking that I'm insane. Of course Arabic doesn't need to have a soft /g/ sound and a /p/ -- it's not bloody English, it's ARABIC. And you would be right.

But as long as they're going to import words from other languages, I suggest they buy a few more consonants.