"يَلّا مَعَ ٱلْسَّلامة يا سام!"
Translation:Alright, goodbye Sam!
37 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
1517
The Arabic word at the beginning of the sentence, يلا, isn't a proper Arabic word and cannot be found in any proper dictionary. It is derived from the expression يا الله and it is used in local dialects as a connection to indicate that you are about to conclude a situation and move to some other subject or situation.
You are right. It's not in my dictionaries either. But well, it's so commonly used, that it doesn't hurt to know about it :-) However, I am more worried about the translation ... I doubt that the English word "alright" is the best possible option. It really depends on the situation.
- 949
The origin of yalla is given by we_speak_arabic as ya allah. Is that an address to Allah?
Hi Katie, I was wondering what this actually meant as well and hoping a native speaker would answer...as they haven't yet, I asked an arabic friend and she said it's invoking the power of Allah but they mainly use it for everyday situations. An example in practical terms could be trying to raise the energy levels in a room to get people in the mood to move onto the next event (going for a walk in the park after lunch). I heard this phrase a lot back in the days of socialising and it's one of the first phrases I learnt as they said it a lot for different scenarios! You can use it to encourage a toddler to walk towards you...ya laa ya laa, or to get someone to hurry up, your tone of voice is very important when using it and that changes with the different scenarios. I can't think a good translation but for the above examples i would say "let's go, let's go", "that's it, keep going", "hurry up, come on". I hope that helps?
Interestingly I think ya laa translates well into French .... Allez Allez, but i don't know the origins of the word so can't be sure.
- 949
Please, Downvoter, tell me why you downvoted me. I'm not responsible for what wespeakarabic say. Is there something blasphemous about wespeakarabic's explanation, that it's originally يا الله?
It would probably be best to not require يلا to be translated as "alright" in English since it is more of a filler word and does not have a direct equivalent.
I agree, yella covers a lot of ground. For example, it also means "hurry up!". In my Arabic classes I was taught you can basically say yella anywhere in a sentence
... يلا
It is a very colloquial Arabic word and the closest meaning I can get is something like 'that's that' or Enough!
Yalla means let's go! In levantine dialect. In Modern Standard Arabic its equivalent would be Hayya Bina. I never heard this translation given here with allright!
Duolingo incorrectly marks "all right" as wrong, and shows "alright" instead. I don't know if that's the case with American English, but as a UK English speaker I was taught that "alright" is not all right! ALRIGHT | meaning in the Cambridge English Dictionary https://dictionary.cambridge.org › dictionary › english › alright 2 Oct 2019 - alright definition: 1. non-standard form of all right
Same here for American English. "Alright" is non-standard and informal at best.
This is all getting pretty colloquial, and so the English translation can be pretty diverse!
OK goodbye and allright goodbye are the same! The sentence before i also said ok and you said another translation...
- 1238
The first word in the sentence is slang or common Arabic not standard or proper Arabic. It's correct that it's derived from (يا الله) which means (oh God), but that's not what the Arab means when they use it. It has two main meanings, 1- (let's go) or (come on). 2- (anyway) or something like (well then). One more thing, the pronounciation of the letter l is more richer than that, more like how you pronounce l in the word love.
What’s wrong with ‘ok, bye Sam’? Seems like the same thing to me but marked as incorrect.
i wrote ok goodbye sam and it was marked incorrect, but we just learned that yallaa means alright or ok (which should be fairly interchangeable imho). most confusing. Also, in Morocco, yallaa means let's go or hurry up, or so i've learned from visiting here many many times.
