I'm not sure I get it. You want to write out English words according to their sounds, but in other scripts, and in a Helvetica style?

Anyway, you'll find Helvetica "cognates" in plenty of other scripts... but the vast majority of them will suck.

hhp

No, I want to write "green" in arabic, cantonese, etc. as it would appear on a sign in dubai, hong kong...

Well, for Helvetica Cyrillic and Helvetica Greek you're in luck.

For Japanese, I recommend Heisei Kaku Gothic. Dynalab has has a similar Chinese font (Hei) in one of their paks.

You can browse through Monotype's list of Non-Western fonts as well. I didn't find a good match for all scripts, but for Bengali I'd go with ITR Dilip, for Devanagari ITR Mitra (although Chakra, Kable, or Yogesh would probably also work), for Gujarati ITR Mohan, for Kannada ITR Sarita, for Telugu ITR Prabha. Their Arial Hebrew isn't bad. Arial Thai is also serviceable, but I'd go for UPC Browillia instead. For Korean, HY Gothic will do, but I find it aesthetically flat.

I'm sure I'm doing a disservice to smaller, independent foundries who have made fonts to harmonize with the Most Ubiquitous Font in the World�.

Thank you so much! Your (very comprehensive) list will be a huge help.

but I still need arabic...

Hey, Raph, killer.

1) Arial (which is a Helvetica clone) has an Arabic (at least in my version of Windows, XP-Home), although looking at it now it doesn't look very Helvetica at all... Which however does mean it looks more Arabic and more readable. :-)
2) There's a font called Arial-Unicode: it covers gobs of codepages (it's about 30Mb) but some of its parts -like the Armenian- are quite lousy, and I don't know if it's even generally available... :-/

Here's an idea: look into Abbar's Univers Arabic (featured in an issue of Eye last year) which will probably be sufficiently Helvetica for you. But really, there must be a "decent" Arabic Helvetica somewhere - it's a face that has infested virtually every script, why not Arabic?

hhp

Hey, check it out: Tahoma (also part of my default Windows) has a monoline Arabic component - might just work for you.

hhp

Helvetica Linotype has Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Hebrew glyphs in one font.

> Arial (which is a Helvetica clone) has an Arabic (at least in my version of Windows, XP-Home), although looking at it now it doesn't look very Helvetica at all...

Arial and TNR use the outlines from our Simplified Arabic font.

Si

This is all very helpful, thanks!

Helvetica Linotype has Arabic glyphs in it as well.