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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.
> The text is rendered left-to-right, instead of right-to-left. siht ekil daer ot gnivah ekil s'tI!
But the text (the arabic one) is not rendered in different direction bad vs good version? So this is just alignment? I can understand this still is very annoying and triggering, but not as bad as needing to read the other direction?!
I hope someone creates something similar for distinguishing southeast asian scripts. Would be very useful for GeoGuessr
I am interested in Lontara and Bugis resources in general, if someone has something they would like to share.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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!
"Goedemorgen, ik hoop dat je bent goed".
I am unsurprised that a website by Rami Ismail uses collective offense-taking as its frame, and uses it to try shaming companies into giving money to non-westerners or adjacent.
It's not automatically insulting to misrender arabic, any more than it is insulting to read hilariously mis/autotranslated "chinglish" in China, or see comically offensive English tshirt slogans in Japan. Depending on context it could even be an attempt at being _nice_ that just misfired.
A simpler explanation and frame is that text rendering is tough enough as it is, and a solution that works perfectly fine for one market won't scale to everywhere. Arabic in particular is very hard, not just because of ligatures, but because right-to-left text is actually bidirectional in practice.
They might've even asked an Arabic speaker to review, but it may have looked okay right until the very last step in the production pipeline, when it got mangled.
Contrast this with a form in English and Spanish, where you need to put the text all on the left and decide which language goes on top.
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…
> ال from ل ا. Who can’t tell these two character sequences from each other? Genuine question. I think the main point the author is making is, if you are including Arabic script somewhere, take a bit of time to either do it right or hire someone to do it right for you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>'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…
Literacy is ability to understand a writing system. I am literate in the Latin alphabet.
Fluency is ability to understand a language. I am fluent in English.
Neither implies the other. You can be fluent but illiterate (the default until modern universal education), and literate but not fluent (I am literate in the Latin alphabet but I am not fluent in Italian).
The claim that there's ~2 billion people who are literate in Arabic script and will laugh at you if you get it wrong, is more or less true. It's of course referring to the large number of people who can read from the Quran in Arabic but without understanding all the words.
I hope someone creates something similar for distinguishing southeast asian scripts. Would be very useful for GeoGuessr