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Help! Is This Arabic?

isthisarabic.com

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Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#281

Post by braingenious »

bqmjjx0kac wrote: post #212
braingenious wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Your analogy is backwards. It’s more like the author said “This is good for all mammals” and you are the one that inserted “but there exists a smaller subset of mammals”, which is entirely orthogonal to the point.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#282

Post by pradn »

mc32 wrote: post #275
pradn wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! The website of the president of Mongolia has three versions, including one with the traditional top-to-bottom script. It's quite well-designed! You can see web-design features that make sense for this script: the nav-bar being on the left, left-to-right scrolling, and pagination at the right end. https://president.mn/mng/

They should make people turn their monitors vertically oriented --are monitors in MN usually in "portrait" or do they maintain a discrepancy of vertical text but horizontal layout?

I think it's ok to have horizontal monitors even for "top-to-bottom" scripts. That's simply because it's less taxing for us to use. Plus, mouse scrollwheels work just as well so it's not problem to navigate.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#283

Post by bqmjjx0kac »

braingenious wrote: post #281
bqmjjx0kac wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your analogy is backwards. It’s more like the author said “This is good for all mammals” and you are the one that inserted “but there exists a smaller subset of mammals”, which is entirely orthogonal to the point.

The author's thesis is that Arabic text is important because two billion people recognize its alphabet. This fact is irrelevant because it's a proper superset of the group that matters: people who can read Arabic.

Let me try a different analogy. "It's important for caterers in the US to provide a gluten-free meal choice. After all, the population is 332 million!" Without knowing the incidence of gluten sensitivity, it's a borderline-misleading statistic.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#284

Post by quickthrower2 »

Oxidation wrote: post #233
quickthrower2 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Wait, you get paid for Internet snark?

> your heuristic doesn't work on my carefully constructed pathological case

This is a bit like writing unit tests, debugging code, and so on.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#285

Post by shantara »

pradn wrote: post #271
lelandfe wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do "top-to-bottom locales" exist? Has anyone built a site with users that get utility out of these? I've usually found that the arguments for these properties revolve around, "well, what if I decide to use traditional Mongolian in the future?," which seems like the biggest case of YAGNI I can think of. I suspect their popularity is owed to tutorial authors showing off their CSS prowess. (I'm also not convinced of the…

Yes! The website of the president of Mongolia has three versions, including one with the traditional top-to-bottom script. It's quite well-designed! You can see web-design features that make sense for this script: the nav-bar being on the left, left-to-right scrolling, and pagination at the right end. https://president.mn/mng/

I’m somewhat surprised to see that some of the characters are not being correctly displayed in iOS Safari. I was expecting the symbols common enough to be used on an official page of a head of state to be common enough for inclusion in the Unicode standard. Or is it a font issue?

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#286

Post by braingenious »

bqmjjx0kac wrote: post #283
braingenious wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your analogy is backwards. It’s more like the author said “This is good for all mammals” and you are the one that inserted “but there exists a smaller subset of mammals”, which is entirely orthogonal to the point.

The author's thesis is that Arabic text is important because two billion people recognize its alphabet. This fact is irrelevant because it's a proper superset of the group that matters: people who can read Arabic. Let me try a different analogy. "It's important for caterers in the US to provide a gluten-free meal choice. After all, the population is 332 million!" Without knowing the incidence of gluten sensitivity, i…

I am glad that we agree that this article that referred to people with varying degrees of knowledge of Arabic script is not, in fact, about people that are fluent.

I also agree that the existence of a subset that wasn’t referred to at all in the article is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand!

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#287

Post by Oxidation »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #284
Oxidation wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, you get paid for Internet snark?

> your heuristic doesn't work on my carefully constructed pathological case This is a bit like writing unit tests, debugging code, and so on.

It's a heuristic (claims to be probably helpful). You might as well complain that checking string size first as part of an equality check of strings that demonstrably have a very large distribution of sizes is obviously dumb because obviously you can construct same-length strings at will. Breaking rules of thumb is the easiest thing in the world.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#288

Post by schoen »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #240
schoen wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another challenge for representing Arabic a display made of line segments is all the curves. If it weren't for the dots, I imagine you could write consonant-only Arabic on something close to a seven-segment display, although it would look bizarre because all the letters would be isolated and there would be so many more straight line segments than in normal Arabic script. (An absolute majority of the isolated forms of…

I don't think curves are a technological problem for a segmented display. You can easily make curved segments and dots. Its all just an LED behind a window painted over with the negative image of the curve. In principle you could make a display that is optimized for OCGDU rather than EIFHTL. Much like latin characters, at some point a segmented display is just going to have to compromise on the tradeoff between corre…

Yes, I wasn't thinking flexibly enough there (no pun intended). Interesting questions!

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#289

Post by pezezin »

LanceH wrote: post #81

The first two correct examples are "Hello world". Third one is "language". The stick character is either a short "a' or "i", which you would know from the little tick marks above/below that you see in decorative script, but are generally left out in print where you get it from context. The J looking character is an "L". So they make "al" like al-jabaar => the strong. It's 95% like "el" in Spanish or "il" in Italian,…

Incidentally you can find the "al" in many words of Arabic origin like alchemy, algebra, algorithm or alcohol.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#290

Post by Dylan16807 »

braingenious wrote: post #286
bqmjjx0kac wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author's thesis is that Arabic text is important because two billion people recognize its alphabet. This fact is irrelevant because it's a proper superset of the group that matters: people who can read Arabic. Let me try a different analogy. "It's important for caterers in the US to provide a gluten-free meal choice. After all, the population is 332 million!" Without knowing the incidence of gluten sensitivity, i…

I am glad that we agree that this article that referred to people with varying degrees of knowledge of Arabic script is not, in fact, about people that are fluent. I also agree that the existence of a subset that wasn’t referred to at all in the article is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand!

The article strongly implies that the "some degree" group is the group that matters. But it's not. The group that matters is somewhere in between "some degree" and "fluent".

And the parent comment was not talking about fluent people when writing "can read".

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