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Help! Is This Arabic?

isthisarabic.com

21–30 of 304 posts

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#21

  > for example Farsi in Egypt (Egyptians primarily speak an Egyptian Dialect of Arabic)
Nit picking here maybe, but neither Farsi (Persian) is a dialect of Arabic (not even in the same family of languages) nor Egyptians speak it typically. Although, they speak a dialect of Arabic.

Update: My mistake, as pointed out here, I misunderstood the point initially.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#22

This 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 loo…

I actually thought that part was perfectly clear.

> In general, the letter combination ال should be common.

So if your text has more than a few words, you should be able to look though your text and see that somewhere.

I can't read Arabic but I can recognize that pattern. I went to https://www.bbc.com/arabic and could find numerous occurrences.

It's a bit like saying "if you have a paragraph in 'English' and it has no e's in it, it's probably not English."

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#23

> for example Farsi in Egypt (Egyptians primarily speak an Egyptian Dialect of Arabic) Nit picking here maybe, but neither Farsi (Persian) is a dialect of Arabic (not even in the same family of languages) nor Egyptians speak it typically. Although, they speak a dialect of Arabic. Update: My mistake, as pointed out here, I misunderstood the point initially.

I believe that was the exact point the article was making.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#24

This 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 loo…

I agree. It doesn't take long to get to the author's thoughts on the most common cause: lack of subject matter expertise. That's cold comfort for those who are working against a tight deadline, though.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#25
post #9

naive 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 tog…

> Is there an arabic equiv of a 7 segment display?

A 7 segment display would have nowhere close to enough resolution to properly render Arabic script. Digital signage would at least be using a low-resolution LED matrix but more likely you'd see LED/LCD displays in places that are affluent and plain analog signage where they are not.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#26
post #12

The question should be more precise. Is this Arabic script? There's a half dozen languages at least that are not Arabic but use Arabic script, such as Persian or Urdu. The typographic rules mentioned still apply though.

Urdu (and IIRC Western Punjabi, i.e. Punjabi as spoken/written in Pakistan) prefer to use the Nasta'liq variety of Arabic script, and historically Persian (Farsi) was written in Nasta'liq. And it is not the case that Nasta'liq is written on a base line--in fact, characters in a word tend to slant down to the left.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#27

> for example Farsi in Egypt (Egyptians primarily speak an Egyptian Dialect of Arabic) Nit picking here maybe, but neither Farsi (Persian) is a dialect of Arabic (not even in the same family of languages) nor Egyptians speak it typically. Although, they speak a dialect of Arabic. Update: My mistake, as pointed out here, I misunderstood the point initially.

Yup, that's the exact point they're making. Non-Arabic-speaker sees Arabic script and assumes it's the Arabic language, so presents it to users that don't understand it, such as presenting Farsi text to Egyptian Arabic speakers. Or, to take the Latin script example, presenting French text to English speakers.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#28
Probably a good place to ask: I want to add an arabic translation to a webpage I operate. My text editor is a bit confused by the unicode symbols. Obviously the text editor displays left-to-right no matter what as it's made for programming.

What's the right way to handle this?

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#29

This 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 loo…

> ال from ل ا.

Who can’t tell these two character sequences from each other? Genuine question.

I think the main point the author is making is, if you are including Arabic script somewhere, take a bit of time to either do it right or hire someone to do it right for you.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#30
You've never had to worry about copy-pasting destroying your text between two programs

Actually, yes. Yes I do.

Try having to work in documents that trade text in multiple languages between Adobe Acrobat, and Microsoft Office. Add in some opinions from iOS, and I end up pasting text into a blank ASCII file just to get it back to basics so I can send it to the next program because neither Microsoft nor Adobe can reliably handle the macOS standard Command-Shift-V to paste text unformatted.

I can't imagine the disaster that would await me if i also has to do it in Arabic.

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