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Help! Is This Arabic?

isthisarabic.com

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Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#111

Post by wruza »

braingenious wrote: post #92
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.

>'two billion people can read the Arabic alphabet to some degree' is a weird claim. Not really, because >there aren't two billion people with functional Arabic literacy. isn’t something that the author claimed. “To some degree” is a phrase that explicitly states that the author isn’t talking about full functional literacy. It would be a super weird claim if “some degree” and “full functional literacy” meant the same…

Exactly. That would be just a subtle exaggeration based on a pseudo-claim, to some degree.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#112

Post by smcl »

LanceH wrote: post #85
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.

> 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

This is what Dutch sounds like to me as an English speaker - plenty of common sounds with English; it has a similar speed, rhythm, intonation to English. It feels like I’m hearing English but have lost my faculties to parse it

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#113

Post by Dylan16807 »

> Bonus 'I hate it' points if it's that Arabic-looking font that's just English text that looks kind of Arabic.

How is a tacky font on some text that was never intended to be Arabic even approaching the badness of these other issues, let alone worse?

Or is the worry you've found a person that doesn't understand different languages exist at all?

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#114

Post by Dylan16807 »

Dalewyn wrote: post #106
oefnak wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hold shift while pasting (chrome) to paste the text only, no formatting.

Or just copypasta through Notepad (or your favorite Linux equivalent) for a universal formatting-stripping solution.

I don't know about "just" for a solution that more than doubles the number of steps.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#115

Post by haditab »

noufalibrahim wrote: post #109

The main thing here is knowledge of the language. Given how widespread Arabic is (though perhaps not so much in the gaming ecosystem which is Rami's area), it makes sense to have someone on the team knowledgeable about the language while doing translations. I encountered a (sort of) similar problem while rendering Devanagari text and wouldn't have realised If I couldn't read the text https://stackoverflow.com/questio…

Although I’ve never tried it, I can’t imagine it would be that difficult to find an editor for the specific language to take a look at it. I doubt they need that many hours of work from the editor for it to be a significant expense.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#116

Post by Dylan16807 »

braingenious wrote: post #92
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.

>'two billion people can read the Arabic alphabet to some degree' is a weird claim. Not really, because >there aren't two billion people with functional Arabic literacy. isn’t something that the author claimed. “To some degree” is a phrase that explicitly states that the author isn’t talking about full functional literacy. It would be a super weird claim if “some degree” and “full functional literacy” meant the same…

> It would be a super weird claim if “some degree” and “full functional literacy” meant the same thing, but they don’t!

They should at least be close if the author isn't trying to pump up the numbers in a misleading way. I definitely assumed that number would be close to the literate number, and not including people who can recognize a tiny fraction. Hell, I can read Arabic "to some degree" if we're being completely literal, but I think including me in a persuasive claim about people that use Arabic would not be appropriate at all.

> You would almost have to

No need to be rude.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#118

Post by ketzo »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #113

> Bonus 'I hate it' points if it's that Arabic-looking font that's just English text that looks kind of Arabic. How is a tacky font on some text that was never intended to be Arabic even approaching the badness of these other issues, let alone worse ? Or is the worry you've found a person that doesn't understand different languages exist at all ?

I think it's extra insulting when someone uses a font that's just supposed to look Arabic

I have definitely seen attempts at a "global-looking" interface where fake languages were put on screen using plausible-looking fonts.

Like, imagine a welcome page with "hello!" in lots of different languages, but the Arabic/Urdu/Armenian/Thai characters are all just literal gibberish that looks kind of like the alphabets in question.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#119

Post by wruza »

xbmcuser wrote: post #88
riffraff wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not everywhere. I live in an islamic region (around 40%). Religious quotes in every other home, but maybe 2-3% of people know at least some arabic letters, not to mention words. You learn it only if you learn at madrasah or are hardcore muslim (not as in extremism, but as in taking it seriously). After you learn it, you have to listen to popular interpreters, because Quran is still hard to get right on your own.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#120

Post by kybernetikos »

braingenious wrote: post #92
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.

>'two billion people can read the Arabic alphabet to some degree' is a weird claim. Not really, because >there aren't two billion people with functional Arabic literacy. isn’t something that the author claimed. “To some degree” is a phrase that explicitly states that the author isn’t talking about full functional literacy. It would be a super weird claim if “some degree” and “full functional literacy” meant the same…

Yeah, I think we're talking here about the number of people who will know you messed up rather than the number of people who can actually read the text in your app.
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