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Help! Is This Arabic?

isthisarabic.com

171–180 of 304 posts

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#171
Geez I get it, two billion people, 28 percent of the population.

(I have no idea where this number comes from but it is vastly inflated.)

All that being said, this is a decent primer on common Arabic rendering mistakes.

Never hurts to support popular languages properly, such as Arabic.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#172

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…

> pump up the numbers in a misleading way

Is it misleading? You don't have to be anything like fluent to realise when text rendering is broken. The quantity that is actually relevant to the discussion is the number of people who, when they look at your UI, will know that the arabic text rendering is broken; not the number of people who are fluent in arabic.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#173
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be careful linking "Muslims" and "Arabic readers/speakers". I know Muslims who would be challenged to speak more than 3 words of Arabic, as well as Arabic speakers who are Christians or atheists.

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

In my surroundings I would say roughly 90% of people reciting al fatiha do so based on sounds learnt by heart, they would hardly be able to explain the meaning of these individual sounds.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#174
post #83

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

And also Aramaic dialects like Syriac

Syriac script looks completely different to Arabic but has the same issues when rendered

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#175
post #104

I wrote a note in GMail the other day where I needed a Latin phrase. For accuracy I pasted it from the web page where I found the original. It screwed up the “x height” of the text that followed. And offended my sense of correct typesetting. I had to do the paste via third app maneuver to get my email right. So this is just QoI between two European-biased applications using two European languages that use the same ba…

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

That should be the default. I think it's incredibly strange to copy text including the formatting, as that is far more context and application dependent. I almost never want to copy formatting.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#176
post #170
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As word games, I like sentences which sound valid in multiple languages, regardless of if the meaning is changed. "Goedemorgen, ik hoop dat je bent goed".

Always fun are sentences that sound very similar and are entirely correct in both languages but mean something completely different, like: He was in the war -- Hij was in de war (he was confused) A stiff in the brook -- Een stijve in de broek (a boner in the pants) Those are the two most famous examples I'm familiar with, but I'm sure there are a lot more.

An ex had the smaller example of incorrectly asking for "un préservatif" when she meant "un préserve".

One of her friends was half of a multi-nationality couple, I think it was French and Irish, and the punchline was their kid, at a beach, yelling, in a strong Irish accent "Look mummy! Phoques!"

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#177
I like the URL of the tool they linked to. http://www.arabic-keyboard.org/photoshop-arabic/

When reading the URL, I imagine an Arabic language called “Photoshop Arabic”, which came into being at the Photoshop team in Adobe XD

- Do you speak Arabic?

- Arabic is not just one language.

- Yeah, but do you speak an Arabic language?

- Yeah, I speak Photoshop Arabic.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#178
post #170
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As word games, I like sentences which sound valid in multiple languages, regardless of if the meaning is changed. "Goedemorgen, ik hoop dat je bent goed".

Always fun are sentences that sound very similar and are entirely correct in both languages but mean something completely different, like: He was in the war -- Hij was in de war (he was confused) A stiff in the brook -- Een stijve in de broek (a boner in the pants) Those are the two most famous examples I'm familiar with, but I'm sure there are a lot more.

Oh wow, I've encountered a lot of words in English/Czech that are "false friends" but it's too far away gramatically to construct similar sounding entire sentences. That's brilliant you can do it with English and Dutch :)

Also I wonder if there's a connection between trousers being "broek" in Dutch and "breeks" in Scots.

edit: wow ok I should've just went to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeks

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#179
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are four letters in Farsi that do not exist in Arabic - (گ ژ چ پ), which make the 'p', 'ch', 'zh' and 'g' sounds, respectively. But the underlying calligraphic system (RTL order, joining forms, harakat diacritics, and so on) is pretty much the same across the Arabic script and its descendants.

The same issue also exists in Latin script, where German has the ß, not to mention various umlauts, strikes, circles and cedilles modifying letters of the otherwise standard Latin script.

I'd imagine it's more like seeing Vietnamese as a European: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet

If you live in Europe and speak a language using a Latin script, you probably have come across most of the extensions other European languages add to the shared base in loanwords or foreign media. But then you look at something like Vietnamese and you are no longer sure how letters work.

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