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Help! Is This Arabic?

isthisarabic.com

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Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#81

Post by LanceH »

The first two correct examples are "Hello world". Third one is "language".

The stick character is either a short "a' or "i", which you would know from the little tick marks above/below that you see in decorative script, but are generally left out in print where you get it from context.

The J looking character is an "L". So they make "al" like al-jabaar => the strong. It's 95% like "el" in Spanish or "il" in Italian, though it is genderless.

The o with dots attached or not to the word on the right indicates feminine gender.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#82

Post by fsckboy »

james-redwood wrote: post #72
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #70

Crazy how there’s “two billion people” who can read Arabic and seemingly 0 of them are making serious contributions to Arabic text rendering except this one specific guy. Weird.

Two billion people can read it to some degree because of Islam. A minority of them actually use the script to write things daily. And there are plenty of people other than this guy making contributions to it, you’ve only just read a singular post by a single person outlining his most common gripes with companies that do not consult native speakers for their translations. It’s not an exhaustive list of people working…

>A minority of them actually use the script to write things daily.

how do I interpret that? something like "hundreds of millions of arabs constitute a minority of 2 billion"? or are you saying that vast majorities in the arab countries don't use arabic script to write things daily?

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#83

Post by slim »

techaqua wrote: post #48

What about farsi and other languages that use arabic script but not arabic at all? I can write (with effort lol) indonesian or javanese in arabic script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jawi_script .

this applies to those languages as well

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#84

Post by LanceH »

Kapura wrote: post #46
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.

Author was more making the point that one occurs commonly and the other order should never occur as the other order would require connecting the letters. The stick character does not connect to the left, but will on the right if that letter connects to the left.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#85

Post by LanceH »

techaqua wrote: post #48

What about farsi and other languages that use arabic script but not arabic at all? I can write (with effort lol) indonesian or javanese in arabic script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jawi_script .

Farsi has the letter "p" which Arabic does not. That letter has three dots on top (sometimes drawn like ^. I think there may be another. Arabic only has the "sh" sound with the three dots.

Trying to read Farsi, it feels like I should know what's going on but am left with the feeling that I've forgotten all my Arabic. Then I'll see some of the bonus letters.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#86

Post by slim »

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…

never seen one. my guess is it does not exist. it would make a great artistic project

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#87

Post by ask_b123 »

jcranmer wrote: post #75
zakki wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The writer most likely count the moslem population. Most moslem don't speak arabic but they recite quran (written in arabic) daily. Most of them will notice if a ال written as ل ا

Egypt has ~100 million people, the vast majority of whom are going to be native Arabic speakers. Algeria, Sudan, and Iraq also have ~40 million people each, again, most of whom are native Arabic speakers (of different varieties). Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen are no slouches either. In short 300 million native speakers of various Arabic languages is extremely plausible. FWIW, the usual estimate for worldwide adher…

FWIW, I am not a muslim nor a native Arabic speaker but I "can read the Arabic alphabet to some degree".

Though if your numbers are correct, 2 billion sounds way too high

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#88

Post by xbmcuser »

riffraff wrote: post #80
randommar wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm completely ignorant of Muslim culture but there was a time where Catholics recited prayers and liturgy in latin and plenty of practitioners recited the sounds without really understanding them. Source: my grand aunts saying "arapreme" where "ora pro nobis" would go (the former kinda sounds like an Italian word). Also probably related, "hocus pocus" is the "magic" expression "hoc est corpus" ("this is the body [of…

Learning how to read and pronounce arabic properly is part of the religion. As all prayers etc are in Arabic and you are supposed to recite them in arabic not a translation and wrong pronunciation can change the meaning so they are strict about teaching proper pronunciation. Though I agree with you about the 2 billion number being incorrect but it was being used a turn of phrase not an accurate number.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#89

Post by raisin_churn »

IncRnd wrote: post #19
gkfasdfasdf wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's weird, because the number is off by an order of magnitude. "If you count all of the varieties of today’s Arabic together, you can safely estimate that there are about 313 million Arabic speakers in the whole world, making it the fifth most-spoken language globally behind Mandarin, Spanish, English and Hindi." [1] [1] https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/how-many-people-speak-ara...

Arabic is both a (group of) language(s) and an alphabet/script. The page isn't claiming that 2B people speak some dialect of the Arabic language, it is claiming some 2B people have a degree of literacy in the alphabet/script, so a quarter of the world's population will potentially know if you've screwed up your website/app/game/whatever. You don't need to speak Latin to know that "anunmtMh mucjmydDDDDD" is just the result of me mashing random keys on my keyboard, because you can read Latin letters. Likewise no Mongolian speaker would believe "прнтзх йоэЁюи" is proper Russian, even though those two languages are wildly different.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#90

Post by nraf »

cool_dude85 wrote: post #43
mcswell wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Most native Arabic speakers will be able to understand large chunks of the Qur'an. There are some words / phrases in the Qur'an that wouldn't be used in modern Arabic that might prove challenging for those who don't engage with the Qur'an on a regular basis, but the Arabic of the Qur'an is very close to that of MSA.

To most Arab speakers, both Classical Arabic and MSA are simply referred to as Fusha.

There are also many non-speakers of Arabic who understand many verses and can pick up on the gist of many verses in the Qur'an.

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