Live data from Hacker News

Help! Is This Arabic?

isthisarabic.com

301–304 of 304 posts

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#301

I hope someone creates something similar for distinguishing southeast asian scripts. Would be very useful for GeoGuessr

Do you mean a script like Lontara? That would be interesting indeed. I am interested in Lontara and Bugis resources in general, if someone has something they would like to share.

I'm not sure how popular these are, so I guess if the explanation included that fact it'd be even better!

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#302

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…

> If I attempt this in China it won't work, because I don't understand the Han script, so I am not sure whether a symbol I'm seeing is the same symbol written more or less ornately or an entirely different symbol which just looks somewhat similar.

Just for fun:

Same symbol: 龙 龍

Completely different: 已 己

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Your entire argument is “look at how clever I am!”, which is fundamentally off-topic when talking about rendering text properly. 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 rend…

> 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".

This is not really true. You tried to center your conclusion that your math was better than the author’s math while distracting from the topic of rendering text properly.

This thread has been about you insisting that people listen to your math and not discuss rendering text properly. lol this thread has been about how clever you are, _not_ rendering text properly.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your entire argument is “look at how clever I am!”, which is fundamentally off-topic when talking about rendering text properly. 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 rend…

> 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". This is not really true. You tried to center your conclusion that your math was better than the author’s math while distracting from the topic of rendering text properly. This thread has been about you insisting that people listen to your math and not discuss rendering text prope…

It's not about the math at all, just "this seems like the wrong group to use as an example". It's a simple point, nobody is trying to show off.

And in these comments I'm assuming that the author has exactly the right number for the group they cited. Because it's really not about math. I have done no calculations and trust the number given. I just think they're citing the wrong statistic. That's why I'm also uninterested in the factors you mentioned that might influence the number up or down. The actual number doesn't matter for this criticism: even if the number in the article happens to match the right statistic, they're still citing the wrong statistic.

Post reply on HN