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Help! Is This Arabic?

isthisarabic.com

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Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#191

Post by amir »

LanceH wrote: post #85
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 .

Farsi has the letter "p" which Arabic does not. That letter has three dots on top (sometimes drawn like ^. I think there may be another. Arabic only has the "sh" sound with the three dots. Trying to read Farsi, it feels like I should know what's going on but am left with the feeling that I've forgotten all my Arabic. Then I'll see some of the bonus letters.

"p" has three dots beneath it (پ), three dots on top is "s" (ث).

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#192

Post by NhanH »

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?

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#193

Post by Galanwe »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #190
Galanwe wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 be the same as Catholics.

Wikipedia says there's ~2 billion muslims, and 400 millions Arabic-dialect speakers (native and non native). So on average 20% of muslims are able to understand basic arabic, I expect that not even half of those would be able to read and understand classical Arabic such as written in Quran.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#194

Post by IanCal »

rippercushions wrote: post #5

This website is well-meaning, but will be difficult to parse if you don't have elementary Arabic and can't tell apart ال from ل ا. What it really needs is a simple reference input string, examples of how it gets broken, and what to do to fix them. The middle case, where the sentence is correctly rendered RTL but the individual words are LTR (breaking the ligatures), is particularly common and insidious because it loo…

> 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.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#195

Post by roenxi »

SamBam wrote: post #22
rippercushions wrote: post #5

This website is well-meaning, but will be difficult to parse if you don't have elementary Arabic and can't tell apart ال from ل ا. What it really needs is a simple reference input string, examples of how it gets broken, and what to do to fix them. The middle case, where the sentence is correctly rendered RTL but the individual words are LTR (breaking the ligatures), is particularly common and insidious because it loo…

I actually thought that part was perfectly clear. > In general, the letter combination ال should be common. So if your text has more than a few words, you should be able to look though your text and see that somewhere. I can't read Arabic but I can recognize that pattern. I went to https://www.bbc.com/arabic and could find numerous occurrences. It's a bit like saying "if you have a paragraph in 'English' and it has n…

The article even links to a site where you can practice: https://notarabic.com/

Thanks to this training, I can now identify that numerous Arabic strings on that site are backwards. He wasn't joking, IJ is everywhere.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#196

Post by mytailorisrich »

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…

Again, the assumption was not that Muslims are Arabic speakers...

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#197

Post by ayewo »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #140
Dylan16807 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about "just" for a solution that more than doubles the number of steps.

It's a well-known, time-honored solution that many people have down to muscle memory now, and has the benefit of not relying on the destination app supporting "paste without formatting" functionality. That is, the best way to deal with apps being too clever about rich text, is to never give them rich text in the first place.

The gp is quibbling about the overuse of the adjectives "just" or the more common "simply" to qualify multiple actions, which are often not simple.

See

Avoid "Just" and "Simply" in Documentation http://jackkelly.name/blog/archives/2019/09/20/avoid_just_an...

Don’t say “simply” in your documentation by Jim Fisher https://www.knowledgeowl.com/blog/posts/dont-say-simply-jim-...

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#198

Post by AdamN »

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?

Layout on an airline magazine where the left side of the page is English and the right side is an RTL language like Hebrew or Arabic.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#199

Post by HPsquared »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #139
4gotunameagain wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for a faster universal solution in windows, press win+R and paste, copy from the run dialogue, and for a faster universal solution in linux make a script that utilizes xclip and bind it to a custom shortcut

Win+R is for single-line text, though if you have a browser focused, you can use the address bar for this too - press CTRL+L to focus it, then usual CTRL+V CTRL+A CTRL+X. Notepad is for multi-line text. EDIT: While the address bar trick may be slightly more convenient than Win+R (and the easiest thing to do on Linux), keep in mind that whatever you paste there will likely end up recorded on someone else's servers. I…

I have notepad pinned to taskbar, so I can do "Ctrl-C, Win-Shift-6, Ctrl-V Ctrl-A Ctrl-C Ctrl-W n Alt-Tab Ctrl-V"

Simple!

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#200

Post by AdamN »

zarzavat wrote: post #159
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…

There is a difference between literacy and fluency. Literacy is ability to understand a writing system. I am literate in the Latin alphabet. Fluency is ability to understand a language. I am fluent in English. Neither implies the other. You can be fluent but illiterate (the default until modern universal education), and literate but not fluent (I am literate in the Latin alphabet but I am not fluent in Italian). The…

2B still seems like a stretch. Can 2B people read (even with low comprehension) a basic paragraph in Arabic? My SWAG would be 1B people.
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