A chance inquiry intersects with a Vocabulary thread, to yield the captioned question.

Wordcrafter has offered us a charming set of "untranslatable" terms in foreign languages.

I just ran across the French term "les beurs" meaning second generation North Africans in France. Tracking the etymology, it seems to be an inversion of Arab in French, plus an elision. According to Wikipedia "a-ra-beu donne beu-ra-a, puis beur par contraction." (Arab reversed is bara or baar...)

The term for this construction is "verlan."

See http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beur and
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verlan

This is not "Spoonerism" nor quite the same as Cockney rhyming slang. Does English have a true equivalent?

There are cants or argots that manipulate language in such a way: e.g., in English, Pig Latin (where dog == og-day), in French, loucherbem or largonji, from boucher 'butcher' or jargon == l + oucher + b + em. I read an article about Verlan about a decade back, and as I remember it, not all words are simply reversed French. Some are loanwords from Arabic and other languages. One argot that did not deform words from the target language in a predictable way is the German Rotwelsch. Another argot that became popular in the late 19th century (and still survives somewhat to this day) is a student argot invented in Boonville, Calfiornia, called Boontling. There's also Vesre in Argentina.