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Help! Is This Arabic?

isthisarabic.com

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Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#221

Post by poulpy123 »

tialaramex wrote: post #168
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.

So, there are degrees of literacy involved, and what we're talking about here is one step up from the bottom layer, a recognition of the writing system, not of a specific language. I can muddle along somewhat in French, especially written French, but I have essentially no Polish despite working with more Polish people than French. Nevertheless, Polish is written in a Latin script (for about a thousand years) and so I…

> nevertheless, Polish is written in a Latin script (for about a thousand years) and so I "can read Polish to some degree"

No, reading and being able to decipher script is different. I can read portuguese, spanish or italian (even romanian) to some degree because the languages are close enough to each other but I can't read polish, basque, finish or magyar despite them using the same latin script

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#222

Post by poulpy123 »

Galanwe wrote: post #14
rippercushions wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an approximation of how many Muslims there are in the world, making the generous but not entirely incorrect assumption that they will be familiar enough with Arabic to at least be able to tell if you've completely borked your rendering.

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.

Coran is traditionnaly taught in arabic even in non arab countries. Also I have no idea how these country can read or decipher arabic in general, I can guess where these number come from

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#223

Post by IanCal »

psychphysic wrote: post #203
IanCal wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and can't tell apart ال from ل ا. Who can't tell these apart? I know literally no Arabic - these characters look very much like latin ones I and J, and it's just an order thing. It seems like an excellent quick test to me to see if there's ordering problems.

Exactly if you aren't comfortable with the idea that glyphs are distinct and order can be assumed to matter. This article can't possibly be scoped for someone like that. There's a side note here, that dyslexia can become apparent in very different written languages.[0] In which case don't try and handle multilingual text pay someone else, even if that's on fiverr. [0] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations…

> Exactly if you aren't comfortable with the idea that glyphs are distinct and order can be assumed to matter.

But isn't that exactly what it's just telling you? The order is important and if you see this very simple pattern it's wrong.

If you read any latin character based language then you surely must be OK with the idea that glyphs can be distinct? Are there many people who exclusively read languages where the order of symbols is not important?

> There's a side note here, that dyslexia can become apparent in very different written languages.[0]

If the point is that dyslexia means some people can't see the difference then that's fair, I'd not come at it from that angle. I don't see any surprising pre-assumed knowledge in this IJ/JI distinction however.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#224

Post by poulpy123 »

Galanwe wrote: post #193
mytailorisrich wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only assumption is that Muslims may, on average, be able to "read the Arabic alphabet to some degree". Obviously 'some degree' makes it very variable, does not imply being able to really read/write/speak. I don't know if it's true but that does not seem unreasonable.

> I don't know if it's true > that does not seem unreasonable. My point is that what seems reasonable to someone that doesn't know anything about the subject means nothing, and could even end up being somewhat offensive. Try to reverse the logic and realize how absurd it would look to you: say a guy in middle east wanted to roughly estimate the number of Latin speakers and made the assumption that it should roughly b…

if all catholics were taught the bible in latin, you could make the assumption (true or false but reasonable) that all catholics would be able to read latin to some degree.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#225

Post by IanCal »

NhanH wrote: post #192
8organicbits wrote: post #157

One of my favorite observations about forms that are in Arabic and English (or any left-to-right and right-to-left language pair) is that you don't need to pick one language as the primary language. The trick is to put the English on the left, a blank field in the middle, and the Arabic on the right. This way an English speaker will naturally read the form as an English form with the Arabic translation off to the rig…

Your text inputs still need to flow either left-to-right or right-to-left though? In which use case would this be useful?

> Your text inputs still need to flow either left-to-right or right-to-left though? In which use case would this be useful?

Anything that doesn't require input - particularly printed ones where you can't just swap with a button. Signs, menus, etc.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#226

Post by poulpy123 »

Cyph0n wrote: post #31
Causality1 wrote: post #6

Also add "use the correct Arabic for your target audience". "Arabic" is not monolithic and using the wrong dialect can go over as well as using Scots on a web page intended for Jamaicans.

As an Arabic speaker, baby steps! For spoken Arabic, a decent placeholder is either MSA (standard Arabic) or a generally understood dialect (Egyptian or Levantine). The latter is what a lot of the recent Arabic game dubs have been doing (e.g., Ubisoft). Another example: Pixar and Disney use Egyptian Arabic for their dubs. Edit: Oh, and for written Arabic, you should almost always be using MSA. That is, you shouldn’t…

Do you know why levantine arabic is more used for dubbing ?

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#227

Post by seanhunter »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #70

Crazy how there’s “two billion people” who can read Arabic and seemingly 0 of them are making serious contributions to Arabic text rendering except this one specific guy. Weird.

This is not at all weird. The world doesn't need 2 billion text layout libraries. It needs a very small number (probably not 1 but there isn't just 1 as is) that actually work, are easy for devs to use etc.

If 1 person does the job very well others don't have to. That's the way we make progress in software.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#228

Post by IanCal »

raisin_churn wrote: post #89
IncRnd wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird, because the number is off by an order of magnitude. "If you count all of the varieties of today’s Arabic together, you can safely estimate that there are about 313 million Arabic speakers in the whole world, making it the fifth most-spoken language globally behind Mandarin, Spanish, English and Hindi." [1] [1] https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/how-many-people-speak-ara...

Arabic is both a (group of) language(s) and an alphabet/script. The page isn't claiming that 2B people speak some dialect of the Arabic language, it is claiming some 2B people have a degree of literacy in the alphabet/script, so a quarter of the world's population will potentially know if you've screwed up your website/app/game/whatever. You don't need to speak Latin to know that "anunmtMh mucjmydDDDDD" is just the r…

Also I cannot read Arabic and know enough to see that something is wrong if it's LTR.

Now I know:

> 3. In general, the letter combination ال should be common. The combination ل ا cannot occur in Arabic script, as those characters should be connected.

I still cannot read a jot of Arabic and know enough to identify some cases where the dev/writer has gotten it wrong.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#229

Post by vanderZwan »

> 3. In general, the letter combination ال should be common. The combination ل ا cannot occur in Arabic script, as those characters should be connected.

Funny enough, Rami is Egyptian/Dutch and ل ا looks a bit like IJ/ij, which is a digraph in Dutch that even used to have its own codepoint once upon a time.

A digraph for which two existing letters in the ASCII code already worked perfectly had a code-point, and I'd argue that even historically almost no Dutch person has ever even used it because keyboards with it barely existed. The only place where you might find an IJ key is on ancient electronic typewriters, and the only reason I know is because I had touch typing lessons on one thirty years ago and the teacher made us use them, after which I had to unlearn that because no computer keyboard featured it.

And meanwhile Windows apparently can't even be bothered to copy/paste Arabic correctly (at least not in 2015 when the embedded video was recorded).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph)

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#230

Post by areyousure »

slim wrote: post #83
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 .

this applies to those languages as well

Mostly yes, and I think the OP is well-written.

But note that in some cases, eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tajik_alphabet#Samples point number 2 won't be accurate. I'm not the best reader of Tajik written in (Perso-)Arabic script, but I don't believe "ال" appears in the samples there. (It does appear in the word "ALphabet" in the opening paragraph!)

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