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Help! Is This Arabic?

isthisarabic.com

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Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#41

Post by IIAOPSW »

least wrote: post #25
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…

> 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.

I could understand if this were a non-alphabet system like Chinese where the information coding is that dense per character. But for an alphabet system, why the mismatch between the bits of information per character and the bits needed to visually represent that character? The Latin alphabet mostly fits on a 7 seg display, and 26 letters requires a theoretical minimum of 5 bits to encode, so the graphical efficiency is close to optimal. What is it about the way other alphabets are encoding information that makes them hard or impossible to reduce down to a small number of segments?

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#42

Post by anonu »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #35
anonu wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I've never seen anything like that. But I have seen dot matrix displays render Arabic script

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#43

Post by cool_dude85 »

mcswell wrote: post #34
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 langua…

>most of those people probably do not understand the Koran's language (which is a more than thousand year old version of Arabic).

My understanding, as a non-Muslim who doesn't speak Arabic, is that the standard Arabic is pretty conservative such that MSA, as would be commonly heard on TV or read in the news or other more formal settings, is not very far off the Arabic used in the Quran. So I think most native Arabic speakers would understand the Quran well, but may not be able to fluently speak or write it.

And that many Arabic learners learn MSA along with a dialect, so many second language speakers would probably be able to productively read the Quran as well.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#44

Post by least »

agolio wrote: post #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?

This might provide some insight for setting up your editor [1]. W3C has guidelines for localization [2] and for using RTL script online [3].

[1] http://andreasmhallberg.github.io/typing-arabic-in-vim/

[2] https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-html-language-...

[3] https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-html-dir

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#45

Post by mcswell »

anonu wrote: post #16

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

He's not talking about Arabic speakers, he's talking about people who can read (to some extent) the Arabic script. This would include speakers of Urdu, Western Punjabi, Pashto, Dari, Farsi and many other (smaller) languages. He may also be talking about Muslims who can sound out the Arabic text of the Koran, even if they don't understand it--a skill which, from what I understand, is valued among Muslims.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#46

Post by Kapura »

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 don't think the intent is to fix every issue, but rather to tell you if you are using busted translation tools. The thing about left-to-right/right-to-left is something that a non-native Arabic speaker may not even know to look out for, even though it is a core aspect of the way the language is written.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#47

Post by throwntoday »

frogulis wrote: post #27
geraneum wrote: post #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.

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.

Well as the Persian and Arabic alphabet are nearly identical, unicode doesn't appear to store two distinct copies, instead just storing one plus the additional characters for Persian.

Oddly though, it stores several copies of identical chinese characters. Traditional, simplified, and the Japanese loaned characters kanji.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#50

Post by throwntoday »

rippercushions wrote: post #3
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.

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.

Funny enough there are many Muslims who can read Arabic but have almost no idea what they are reading as they don't speak it. The Quran is interpreted into many languages but prayer is read in Arabic no matter what their native language is. Reading the Quran is also preferrably done in Arabic, as translation is open to the interpretation of the translator, so the only truly immutable word is read in Arabic.
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