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Help! Is This Arabic?

isthisarabic.com

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Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#211

Post by einpoklum »

Note that:

1. There are several languages which (sometimes) use the Arabic script, but are not Arabic, like Kurdish, Turkish up until a century ago, Javanese etc.

2. Farsi sort-uses the Arabic script, with some glyphs unique to it

... so things can be more complex than just deciding "Is it Arabic?" . But I like the website!

----

Right-to-Left languages with non-Arabic script are also often similarly mis-rendered. I'd given the more popular scripts as an example, like N'Ko and Adlam, but almost nobody in the West bothers to print those, plus I'm not familiar enough with them; so - Hebrew:

In the disconnected-form script, here's Hello:

שלום עולם

(sounds like: shalom)

do you see the squarish glyph at the end of each of these words? That's the final-form Mem consonant. But in the beginning or the middle of the word, its glyph is מ. So if you see:

םולש

that means someone printed it in left-to-right order of glyphs instead of right-to-left.

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These issues come up a lot in our LibreOffice RTL languages user group on Telegram:

https://t.me/+GY3UwBnlDN9mY2M8

and if you're particularly interested in Arabic, there's the Arabic-issues-specific group:

https://t.me/LibreOffice_Arabic

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#212

Post by bqmjjx0kac »

braingenious wrote: post #148
Dylan16807 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>They should at least be close if the author isn't trying to pump up the numbers in a misleading way. I’m genuinely confused here. The author was pretty much crystal clear about how he defined the size of the group that he was talking about, I do not understand how a person could be confused let alone feel the need to accuse him of being intentionally misleading. What exactly is the nefarious goal that the author was…

Suppose I said, "It's important to protect endangered species. There are 130 billion mammals on Earth."

It's plain English, but I picked the wrong measure to support my claim.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#213

Post by disintegrator »

Tangentially, for those doing web development, CSS has a bunch of "logical" properties [1] that adapt to the locale of the user agent. For example, you can swap out `margin-left` and `margin-bottom` in your CSS with `margin-inline-start` and `margin-block-end` respectively. Similarly, `text-align` accepts start/end instead of left/right. Even if you're not targetting right-to-left or top-to-bottom locales, it's easy enough to switch to logical properties and get most of the work out of the way if you change your mind in the future.

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Logical...

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#214

Post by quickthrower2 »

Oxidation wrote: post #204
quickthrower2 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A group of flying kookaburras flap about a body of liquid. In this group, individuals distinguish from distinct sorts. Small, big, colorful or plain, all flap wings as a way to maintain afloat. It's a sight to watch as this group zips, zooms, and turns all around. It's a natural habitat for this flying squad, and you can find it in many spots around our world. This group adds to our natural world's charm and, through…

Ah yes, the good old "your heuristic doesn't work on my carefully constructed pathological case" observation, wouldn't be the Internet without that. GP also said "probably". That's how heuristics work.

You would almost think what you described was our profession :-)

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#215

Post by cyborgx7 »

I was aware of this problem because I follow Rami Ismail for his game development and this site reminded me of him. Then I get to the bottom and it turns out it was made by him. Glad to see he is still fighting the good fight.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#216

Post by fjfaase »

I once had to implement Arabic support in an existing editor. It also had to support mixed RTL and LTR input. Interesting to see how the cursors walks differently through the text when going going forward and backwards and how text selection works. Most document editors (MS Word, Libre Office with CTL, for example) and browsers implement this correcly as well. So, you can just compare if a text is displayed correctly by comparing how it looks in a document editor or a text box in an HTML file.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#217

Post by thaumasiotes »

mcv wrote: post #165
adaml_623 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great example because if that text is on your corporate website then someone upstream is not doing their job Edit: obviously it is English but it's definitely not correct for a company website.

But it may be totally correct for a website about kookaburras. There's more than just corporate websites, and frankly, if a company of any meaningful size offers content in Arabic, I'd expect them to hire someone for that. Even part-time or freelance.

> But it may be totally correct for a website about kookaburras.

It isn't; "to maintain afloat" is not grammatical.

You could replace that with "stay afloat" and it would fix the grammatical error without introducing an E.

There's a similar unforced error in referring to a "group" of kookaburras rather than a "flock".

"Individuals distinguish from distinct sorts" is gibberish. I cannot tell what it's supposed to mean.

"All flap wings as a way to [stay] afloat" is, at best, very awkward; fluent English would require "flap their wings", but that would introduce an E.

"Flapping about a body of liquid" is a very odd thing to say unless the body of liquid happens to be suspended in midair, since midair is the only location where you can find birds flapping.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#218

Post by cyborgx7 »

frogulis wrote: post #33
anonu wrote: post #16

> to almost 2 billion people. There are probably 350 million Arabic speakers.

Not sure why this is being downvoted - a quick Google search gives me numbers ranging from 250-450 million, and 350 million sits comfortably within that range. It's possible that the article refers to the number of readers of Arabic script in any language, which I imagine would be a bigger number.

> Not sure why this is being downvoted

Because it's comparing the wrong numbers. The article specifies what the 2 million refers to:

"Here's a 18 minute video of I talk I gave at XOXO in 2015 that'll teach you more than enough Arabic to not embarrass yourself in front of everyone who can read the Arabic alphabet to some degree. That's about 2 billion people, or 28% of the human population, and they will absolutely notice that you don't know what you're doing and laugh at you in languages you cannot even read."

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#219

Post by erenyeager »

slowwriter wrote: post #158
Cyph0n wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I believe the difference is simply that the two sequences are in reverse order of each other.

Not only this but the reverse of ال is لا because Arabic letters change based on position of the letter (initial, medial, final). So ل ا is never going to be a word since you lack joining, since the ل will look like لـ if joined and لا is a distinct ligature

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#220

Post by Dylan16807 »

tsukikage wrote: post #172
Dylan16807 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The only reason for me to care that it's broken is on behalf of the people that can read it.

So even though I know a single digit number of words, and you can count me in that two billion, nobody should care about getting it right on my behalf.

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