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Help! Is This Arabic?

isthisarabic.com

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Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#31

Post by Cyph0n »

Causality1 wrote: post #6

Also 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.

As an Arabic speaker, baby steps!

For spoken Arabic, a decent placeholder is either MSA (standard Arabic) or a generally understood dialect (Egyptian or Levantine).

The latter is what a lot of the recent Arabic game dubs have been doing (e.g., Ubisoft). Another example: Pixar and Disney use Egyptian Arabic for their dubs.

Edit: Oh, and for written Arabic, you should almost always be using MSA. That is, you shouldn’t worry about the dialect of your target audience.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#32

Post by irjustin »

rippercushions wrote: post #5

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 think that's the point though? It's trying to educate us that we should pay attention to that difference as we can the block of text.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#33

Post by frogulis »

anonu wrote: post #16

> to almost 2 billion people. There are probably 350 million Arabic speakers.

Not sure why this is being downvoted - a quick Google search gives me numbers ranging from 250-450 million, and 350 million sits comfortably within that range.

It's possible that the article refers to the number of readers of Arabic script in any language, which I imagine would be a bigger number.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#34

Post by mcswell »

whoknew1122 wrote: post #2

The 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.

This may be referring to people who can "read" the Koran, where "read" means say the text out loud. Understanding what they're saying is a different question, and most of those people probably do not understand the Koran's language (which is a more than thousand year old version of Arabic).

Alternatively, it may be referring to people who read a language written in Arabic script, but not necessarily the Arabic language. Languages that use some variety of Arabic script include Persian (Farsi and Dari), Urdu, Pashto, Western Punjabi, Uyghur and some other languages. Some of those languages use vowel diacritics, particularly Uyghur.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#35

Post by IIAOPSW »

anonu wrote: post #13
IIAOPSW wrote: 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…

Numbers will typically be rendered in Arabic numerals and not in Arabic script if a 7 segment display is being used. Latin characters are already pretty difficult to read on a 7 segment... Arabic would be even more difficult.

That's not entirely what I meant by my question. Let me try rephrasing. Is there a thing that works on the same principle as a 7 segment display, possibly with a more than 7 segments but still a manageable amount, which is designed to display Arabic characters with a similar amount of legibility?

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#37

Post by rahimiali »

anonu wrote: 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.

One of the three rules on the page do not apply to either Persian or Urdu. The article “Al” isn’t used in them, so the third rule doesn’t apply.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#38

Post by randommar »

Galanwe wrote: post #14
rippercushions wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would be careful linking "Muslims" and "Arabic readers/speakers". I know Muslims who would be challenged to speak more than 3 words of Arabic, as well as Arabic speakers who are Christians or atheists.

i think every muslim can speaks more than 3 words, every muslim known what al fatiha is. that's 25 words.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#39

Post by least »

andsoitis wrote: post #18
least wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The 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. English has cursive and I think most English speakers are at least aware of cursive. We have script that is designed for print as well, though, while Arabic script doe…

Some have developed non-cursive Arabic script, but it hasn’t taken off. For instance, the Simplified Arabic Alphabet was devised by Muhammad Shakeel as an alternative way to write Arabic. It is a non-cursive alphabetical script as opposed to the traditional cursive Arabic abjad. The letter shapes are based mostly on the early Arabic Jazm script. It is not connected to or inspired by Nasri Khattar's Unified Arabic scr…

Interesting. I think it probably hasn't really taken off because there's not really any reason for it to at this point. We have high resolution displays and printers and software that is powerful enough to render and input regular Arabic script just fine.

There were similar issues with typing JP/KR/CN glyphs on computers for a long time which thanks to technological progress has stopped being something that needed solving.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#40

Post by mcswell »

olliej wrote: post #7

The 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 capitalizati…

Another example of a contextually dependent glyph in Latin script is the non-word-final form of 's' that looks sort of like an 'f' in English texts. See for example images of the hand-written US Constitution, where this comes up in the very first word "Congress", which appears to modern readers to be spelled "Congrefs".

This led to an embarrassing mistake when Google OCRed older books that contained the word "suck."

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