Help! Is This Arabic?
isthisarabic.com
Help! Is This Arabic?
1–10 of 304 posts
Re: Help! Is This Arabic?
#2The whole 'two billion people can read the Arabic alphabet to some degree' is a weird claim. Maybe it's possible, but there aren't two billion people with functional Arabic literacy.
Most Arabic is written without small vowels (harakat). You could have script that is justified right-to-left and with letters correctly connected and it still be gibberish. And many of those 'two billion people' would be none the wiser.
Re: Help! Is This Arabic?
#3The whole 'two billion people can read the Arabic alphabet to some degree' is a weird claim. Maybe it's possible, but there aren't two billion people with functional Arabic literacy. Most Arabic is written without small vowels (harakat). You could have script that is justified right-to-left and with letters correctly connected and it still be gibberish. And many of those 'two billion people' would be none the wiser.
It's an approximation of how many Muslims there are in the world, making the generous but not entirely incorrect assumption that they will be familiar enough with Arabic to at least be able to tell if you've completely borked your rendering.
Re: Help! Is This Arabic?
#4The whole 'two billion people can read the Arabic alphabet to some degree' is a weird claim. Maybe it's possible, but there aren't two billion people with functional Arabic literacy. Most Arabic is written without small vowels (harakat). You could have script that is justified right-to-left and with letters correctly connected and it still be gibberish. And many of those 'two billion people' would be none the wiser.
[deleted]
Re: Help! Is This Arabic?
#5This website is well-meaning, but will be difficult to parse if you don't have elementary Arabic and can't tell apart ال from ل ا.
What it really needs is a simple reference input string, examples of how it gets broken, and what to do to fix them. The middle case, where the sentence is correctly rendered RTL but the individual words are LTR (breaking the ligatures), is particularly common and insidious because it looks plausible to non-Arabic speakers.
Re: Help! Is This Arabic?
#6Also add "use the correct Arabic for your target audience". "Arabic" is not monolithic and using the wrong dialect can go over as well as using Scots on a web page intended for Jamaicans.
Re: Help! Is This Arabic?
#7The core issue is people without familiarity with how non-native (to them) script can function - in the English centric world it means assuming one letter == one visual glyph, and the visual glyph won't get a different rendering depending on context. Native English speakers don't seem to really acknowledge that the English alphabet does have contextually different glyphs for the same letter: that is what capitalization is (and applies to other latin descended scripts). Of course single character = single glyph equivalence fails for many latin descended scripts 'ss' vs 'ß', 'ij' vs 'ÿ'. This is entirely ignoring accented letters which break anglo-centric "single code point == single character" equivalence (though this is more understood).
People often think text layout is "easy" because they don't consider how anything other than their common experience treats thing (the reality is there still isn't a good vertical text layout story on the web).
This is also demonstrated whenever people go "I'll handle text layout myself", because they think one key press = one character, and immediately break text entry for more than half the world.
Re: Help! Is This Arabic?
#8The whole 'two billion people can read the Arabic alphabet to some degree' is a weird claim. Maybe it's possible, but there aren't two billion people with functional Arabic literacy. Most Arabic is written without small vowels (harakat). You could have script that is justified right-to-left and with letters correctly connected and it still be gibberish. And many of those 'two billion people' would be none the wiser.
> The whole 'two billion people can read the Arabic alphabet to some degree' is a weird claim
Not a weird claim at all. Even without harakat, it is obvious when Arabic script is messed up (via alignment or letter reversal) to anyone who can read the script. It just makes whatever you are reading look janky and unprofessional.
Re: Help! Is This Arabic?
#9naive question. Is there an arabic equiv of a 7 segment display? It looks like a writing system that is very amenable to that sort of digitization. Always a center line, and then up to two strokes going {up, down, diagonal, curved} intersecting at the {left, middle right} of the main line, followed by some dots to further specify a sub-category. Seems like a small finite set of graphical components being composed together. Which in fairness describes any writing system, but this one seems to have a very simple and predictable stroke sub-alphabet (I mean that as high praise not as a slight, simplicity is good). Am I wrong? What does a simple Arabic digital display look like? I've never seen one.
Re: Help! Is This Arabic?
#10When you doubt, use google translate instead of randomly hitting the keyboard.