btata 7lowa بطاطا حلوة
Moroccan Darija · noun
“btata 7lowa” (بطاطا حلوة) is a noun in Moroccan Darija meaning sweet potato.
Meanings
- sweet potato
Usage
Btata 7lowa, literally "sweet potato", means the sweet potato. It is sold in markets and eaten oven-baked, boiled or in a tajine. The word 7lowa is the feminine form of "7lou" (sweet): it agrees with btata, treated here as feminine. It is important to distinguish this expression from "btata" used alone, which always means the ordinary potato.
Example
البطاطا الحلوة فالكوشة بنينة بزاف
l-btata l-7lowa f l-koucha bnina bzaf
“Oven-baked sweet potato is really good.”
How to write it in Latin letters
In Arabizi, Darija written in Latin letters, you will find “btata 7lowa” but also “btata 7lwa”, “batata 7lwa” and “btata hlowa”. No spelling is official: people write the sounds as they hear them.
Digits stand in for Arabic letters that have no Latin equivalent: 7 is ha (ح), a breathy h from the throat.