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Help! Is This Arabic?

isthisarabic.com

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Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#131

Post by jamiek88 »

smcl wrote: post #112
LanceH wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes! It’s kinda like “hearing voices’. It sounds like English, but if you try and ‘tune in’ you can’t!

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#132

Post by kybernetikos »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #52
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…

ah but you see, my conviction on one letter == one visual glyph context be damned is not hypocrisy nor is it cultural chauvinism. i for one am perfectly consistent. capitalization ought be abolished, tradition is not justification. language is about the encoding of information. capitalization is wasted code space. tradition is dead men telling you how to live. and after that, simplify the letters down into combinatio…

Completely seriously I'd like to see English get rid of capitals. They're almost entirely useless and confuse learners for no benefit. On top of that kids books that use a font that makes I and l look the same annoy me too.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#133

Post by junon »

dmolony wrote: post #71

> I hope this will you help in case you cannot afford to hire anyone at all with a elementary school level of Arabic script reading. Oops.

I'm confused, are you implying a simple mistake made by natives all the time means the author should be outright discredited or something?

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#134

Post by junon »

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'm not an expert but I have gone down both the Arabic font creation road and the custom segmented display roads - not at the same time, of course.

My understanding of Arabic is that this would be _exceedingly_ hard to generalize into individual, discrete glyphs that could not only be broken out into their own segments but then repeated in a way that makes sense.

The only way I could personally think of is with matrix displays, which act more like normal displays.

This is because even though it is an alphabetic script, the blending between characters is non-trivial and highly dependent on the sequence of glyphs, which causes an explosion of possible combinations depending on what's being written.

That said, you can always design segmented displays that show _any_ shape or script, assuming you don't need to change them.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#135

Post by jamiek88 »

nraf wrote: post #90
cool_dude85 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 m…

MSA is Modern Standard Arabic to save others a google!

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#136

Post by zakki »

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…

PEW Research and Wikipedia estimate are 1.9B.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2011/01/27/the-future-o...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_by_country

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#137

Post by jamiek88 »

redbell wrote: post #127
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…

> it makes sense to have someone on the team knowledgeable about the language while doing translations Speaking about translations, I had. Laughable experience when I was experimenting with Google translate API a few years ago, when I picked some random text about solar system from Wikipedia that reads something like “Mercury is a planet of the solar system”, when translated to Arabic, it read “الزئبق هو أحد كواكب ال…

When I translate that with safari it comes back as ‘mercury is one of the planets in the solar system’?

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#138

Post by ahmetnoid »

I watched the video at the bottom of the page, and it was all fun and I did laugh. But you lost me at the difference between ق and ك (q and k respectively) They are different sounds and do not have the same pronunciation.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#139

Post by TeMPOraL »

4gotunameagain wrote: post #124
Dalewyn wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

for a faster universal solution in windows, press win+R and paste, copy from the run dialogue, and for a faster universal solution in linux make a script that utilizes xclip and bind it to a custom shortcut

Win+R is for single-line text, though if you have a browser focused, you can use the address bar for this too - press CTRL+L to focus it, then usual CTRL+V CTRL+A CTRL+X.

Notepad is for multi-line text.

EDIT: While the address bar trick may be slightly more convenient than Win+R (and the easiest thing to do on Linux), keep in mind that whatever you paste there will likely end up recorded on someone else's servers. I bet this was a major driver for integrating previously separate address bar and search bar, and adding "search suggestions" function...

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#140

Post by TeMPOraL »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #114
Dalewyn wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a well-known, time-honored solution that many people have down to muscle memory now, and has the benefit of not relying on the destination app supporting "paste without formatting" functionality.

That is, the best way to deal with apps being too clever about rich text, is to never give them rich text in the first place.

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