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> It's a bit like saying "if you have a paragraph in 'English' and it has no e's in it, it's probably not English." For the exception, see see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel)
Wow, having read the example prose, it is quite an interesting sounding book.
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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".
Posters have been able to pinpoint the number of fluent speakers, can you give me a ballpark to how many people matter and how many don’t matter?
This article about rendering text appropriately has taken such a fun turn into sorting folks into groups that “matter” and “don’t matter”?
If being rigid about these numbers is so important, how many people that don’t matter today might matter next year? How many people are learning arabic script? How many might want to look up something written in arabic without it being rendered in absolute nonsense?
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Yes! It’s kinda like “hearing voices’. It sounds like English, but if you try and ‘tune in’ you can’t!
I know some Spanish and hearing Portuguese does this to me every time; it's like I've almost tuned in but there's nothing there.
Portuguese and Italian on the other hand are much closer, and if spoken slowly enough, somewhat understandable.
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.
> Today adherents of Islam constitute the world's second-largest religious group. An estimated 1.8 billion or more than 24% of the world population identify themselves as Muslims. Add in non-Muslim Arabs and you've hit 2 billion right quickly. The assumption is that a Muslim can recognize the Quran's written language somewhat.
I am deeply involved in the Muslim community, and can safely say that reciting holy works in Arabic offers zero useful knowledge of the modern language.
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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".
Literally what do you think the words “some degree” mean to you personally? Posters have been able to pinpoint the number of fluent speakers, can you give me a ballpark to how many people matter and how many don’t matter? This article about rendering text appropriately has taken such a fun turn into sorting folks into groups that “matter” and “don’t matter”? If being rigid about these numbers is so important, how man…
I answered that in my first post! I can read a tiny tiny bit of Arabic. That puts me into the literal "some degree" group, but I am also definitely in the not-mattering group, because rendering mistakes with Arabic will not cause me any problems with reading.
> Posters have been able to pinpoint the number of fluent speakers, can you give me a ballpark to how many people matter and how many don’t matter?
Have they? But I don't have numbers, I'm just saying that "fluent" is too small and "some degree" is too big.
> This article about rendering text appropriately has taken such a fun turn into sorting folks into groups that “matter” and “don’t matter”?
Are you offended that I classify myself as not mattering in this very specific context? You don't have to make it sound like I'm saying people don't matter in general, jeez.
> If being rigid about these numbers is so important
If a number is worth busting out to make a point, it's worth being correct.
> how many people that don’t matter today might matter next year? How many people are learning arabic script?
What's your point? If the number changes, then use the new number. Don't use a wrong number because it might change later. Or if you have an expected future number, label it as such.
> How many might want to look up something written in arabic without it being rendered in absolute nonsense?
A lot of those people aren't even inside the "some degree" group, so now you're making a different argument. I'd rather not start any new tangents at this point, if you don't mind.
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I'm not an expert but I have gone down both the Arabic font creation road and the custom segmented display roads - not at the same time, of course. My understanding of Arabic is that this would be _exceedingly_ hard to generalize into individual, discrete glyphs that could not only be broken out into their own segments but then repeated in a way that makes sense. The only way I could personally think of is with matri…
What exactly are the character blending rules? When you say non-trivial, are we talking normal non-trivial or oops-I-embedded-a-Turing-machine-in-my-written-language non-trivial? I'm going to guess the various shifts you allude to are simple transformations for a pen-plotter, perhaps accumulating some "context" offsets to the initial position or flipping some glyph etc. Not sure how to translate that to segments, unl…
But it doesn't end there. Fonts have a crazy number of different lookup tables that can affect how glyphs are drawn. While not Turing complete they're certainly very close.
In Arabic, how the baseline blends affecting the base shape of the glyph, plus lots of kerning rules, etc. would make Arabic very difficult to replicate on a segmented display.
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I grew up in a Muslim environment and I know al fatiha and more. But I don't understand a single word of it or can't tell if what I recited is a word or a whole sentece. I believe 99% of the population in my country are the same. Also we can't read Arabic script.
What country did you grow up in? We all don't speak arabic but can fluently read the script.
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Literally what do you think the words “some degree” mean to you personally? Posters have been able to pinpoint the number of fluent speakers, can you give me a ballpark to how many people matter and how many don’t matter? This article about rendering text appropriately has taken such a fun turn into sorting folks into groups that “matter” and “don’t matter”? If being rigid about these numbers is so important, how man…
> Literally what do you think the words “some degree” mean to you personally? I answered that in my first post! I can read a tiny tiny bit of Arabic. That puts me into the literal "some degree" group, but I am also definitely in the not-mattering group, because rendering mistakes with Arabic will not cause me any problems with reading. > Posters have been able to pinpoint the number of fluent speakers, can you give m…
My point is that you’re trying to use some sort of odd pedantic mark trick to shift the conversation from your experience of “There is a group that I personally don’t care about” to “Math dictates that this is not actually a problem worth addressing.”
Your position that the important takeaway here is actually the importance of scrutinizing pointless minutiae rather than text rendering being fundamentally broken isn’t empirically based. Your entire argument is “look at how clever I am!”, which is fundamentally off-topic when talking about rendering text properly.
Like lol, how are people supposed to learn the script if their examples are all messed up? As a maths genious surely you could see the issue with how “impacted people” is somewhere between “fluent people” and “fluent people plus an unknown number of others.” What hard number did you land at when adding unknown variable x to the number of fluent speakers you googled?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Literally what do you think the words “some degree” mean to you personally? I answered that in my first post! I can read a tiny tiny bit of Arabic. That puts me into the literal "some degree" group, but I am also definitely in the not-mattering group, because rendering mistakes with Arabic will not cause me any problems with reading. > Posters have been able to pinpoint the number of fluent speakers, can you give m…
> What's your point? My point is that you’re trying to use some sort of odd pedantic mark trick to shift the conversation from your experience of “There is a group that I personally don’t care about” to “Math dictates that this is not actually a problem worth addressing.” Your position that the important takeaway here is actually the importance of scrutinizing pointless minutiae rather than text rendering being funda…
I think this is a really uncharitable read of this conversation. This thread has been about the veracity and the relevance of the author's claim that "two billion people can read Arabic to some degree".
I don't think anyone is trying to refute the author's conclusion that Arabic text rendering is important. I also don't think anyone is trying to show off how clever they are.
Personally, I agree with the author's conclusion, and I thought the post was really neat! But I also think the 2 billion statistic weakened their argument -- it's better to omit a statistic than include the wrong one.