Metropolitan Museum

The Metrolpolitan Museum of Art has posters on the fencing around some construction out front that say "One Met, many worlds" in a number of languages. In all the languages but one, as far as I can tell, the word for Met is Met (I don't read Chinese). The exception is Arabic. In Arabic it says حف واحد، كثير من عالم = "one haf, many worlds." (More or less; hlatif can let us know if the "many worlds" part is idiomatic. I wonder if worlds shouldn't be plural and have the definite article, but I am no expert.)

I'm trying to figure out where the haf came from. My guess is that somehow the word متحف, mathaf, museum, is involved, and they meant to cut out the haf part, leaving mat = Met, and instead cut out mat. Maybe somebody assumed that "the first two letters" meant the two letters on the left. But I can't come up with a realistic scenario as to how that could actually have happened.

Maybe someone here has a better idea.

"katheer min aalam" does not sound like anything idiomatic I am aware of. It strikes me as Arabic of a child and literally translates into "many of /from world". I would have written "Aawalem mutaaddidah" which would closely resemble :several worlds. One could have used the often used Qur'anic term AAalameen, which means worlds amongst other things.

I also am not sure why the mat was removed from mathaf and I wonder if it was accidental as they ate part of a word to allow another pattern or something like that. Take care Vinny and all

Hussein