17 ms·

Help! Is This Arabic?

• whoknew1122 4y ago
  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.
  • rippercushions 4y ago
    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.
    • Galanwe 4y ago
      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.
      • randommar 4y ago
        i think every muslim can speaks more than 3 words, every muslim known what al fatiha is. that's 25 words.
        • riffraff 4y ago
          I'm completely ignorant of Muslim culture but there was a time where Catholics recited prayers and liturgy in latin and plenty of practitioners recited the sounds without really understanding them. Source: my grand aunts saying "arapreme" where "ora pro nobis" would go (the former kinda sounds like an Italian word). Also probably related, "hocus pocus" is the "magic" expression "hoc est corpus" ("this is the body [of Christ]").
          • xbmcuser 4y ago
            Learning how to read and pronounce arabic properly is part of the religion. As all prayers etc are in Arabic and you are supposed to recite them in arabic not a translation and wrong pronunciation can change the meaning so they are strict about teaching proper pronunciation. Though I agree with you about the 2 billion number being incorrect but it was being used a turn of phrase not an accurate number.
            • wruza 4y ago
              Not everywhere. I live in an islamic region (around 40%). Religious quotes in every other home, but maybe 2-3% of people know at least some arabic letters, not to mention words. You learn it only if you learn at madrasah or are hardcore muslim (not as in extremism, but as in taking it seriously). After you learn it, you have to listen to popular interpreters, because Quran is still hard to get right on your own.
        • neoberg 4y ago
          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.
          • throwaway2203 4y ago
            What country did you grow up in? We all don't speak arabic but can fluently read the script.
            • neoberg 4y ago
              Turkey
        • Galanwe 4y ago
          In my surroundings I would say roughly 90% of people reciting al fatiha do so based on sounds learnt by heart, they would hardly be able to explain the meaning of these individual sounds.
      • mytailorisrich 4y ago
        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.
        • Galanwe 4y ago
          > 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.
          • mytailorisrich 4y ago
            Again, the assumption was not that Muslims are Arabic speakers...
          • poulpy123 4y ago
            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.
      • poulpy123 4y ago
        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
    • throwntoday 4y ago
      Funny enough there are many Muslims who can read Arabic but have almost no idea what they are reading as they don't speak it. The Quran is interpreted into many languages but prayer is read in Arabic no matter what their native language is. Reading the Quran is also preferrably done in Arabic, as translation is open to the interpretation of the translator, so the only truly immutable word is read in Arabic.
      • wruza 4y ago
        Interpretation of Arabic itself is the least problem they have. It takes a well-educated interpreter to make correct sense out of most statements. With few exceptions, Islamic revelations do not state which Quranic verses or hadith have been abrogated, and Muslim exegetes and jurists have disagreed over which and how many hadith and verses of the Quran are recognized as abrogated,[6][7] with estimates varying from less than ten to over 500.[8][9]
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • gkfasdfasdf 4y ago
    > The whole 'two billion people can read the Arabic alphabet to some degree' is a weird claim Not a weird claim at all. Even without harakat, it is obvious when Arabic script is messed up (via alignment or letter reversal) to anyone who can read the script. It just makes whatever you are reading look janky and unprofessional.
    • IncRnd 4y ago
      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-arabic https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/how-many-people-speak-ara...
      • zakki 4y ago
        The writer most likely count the moslem population. Most moslem don't speak arabic but they recite quran (written in arabic) daily. Most of them will notice if a ال written as ل ا
        • jcranmer 4y ago
          Egypt has ~100 million people, the vast majority of whom are going to be native Arabic speakers. Algeria, Sudan, and Iraq also have ~40 million people each, again, most of whom are native Arabic speakers (of different varieties). Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen are no slouches either. In short 300 million native speakers of various Arabic languages is extremely plausible. FWIW, the usual estimate for worldwide adherents to Islam is ~1 billion.
          • ask_b123 4y ago
            FWIW, I am not a muslim nor a native Arabic speaker but I "can read the Arabic alphabet to some degree". Though if your numbers are correct, 2 billion sounds way too high
  • mcswell 4y ago
    This may be referring to people who can "read" the Koran, where "read" means say the text out loud. Understanding what they're saying is a different question, and most of those people probably do not understand the Koran's language (which is a more than thousand year old version of Arabic). Alternatively, it may be referring to people who read a language written in Arabic script, but not necessarily the Arabic language. Languages that use some variety of Arabic script include Persian (Farsi and Dari), Urdu, Pashto, Western Punjabi, Uyghur and some other languages. Some of those languages use vowel diacritics, particularly Uyghur.
    • cool_dude85 4y ago
      >most of those people probably do not understand the Koran's language (which is a more than thousand year old version of Arabic). My understanding, as a non-Muslim who doesn't speak Arabic, is that the standard Arabic is pretty conservative such that MSA, as would be commonly heard on TV or read in the news or other more formal settings, is not very far off the Arabic used in the Quran. So I think most native Arabic speakers would understand the Quran well, but may not be able to fluently speak or write it. And that many Arabic learners learn MSA along with a dialect, so many second language speakers would probably be able to productively read the Quran as well.
      • nraf 4y ago
        Most native Arabic speakers will be able to understand large chunks of the Qur'an. There are some words / phrases in the Qur'an that wouldn't be used in modern Arabic that might prove challenging for those who don't engage with the Qur'an on a regular basis, but the Arabic of the Qur'an is very close to that of MSA. To most Arab speakers, both Classical Arabic and MSA are simply referred to as Fusha. There are also many non-speakers of Arabic who understand many verses and can pick up on the gist of many verses in the Qur'an.
        • jamiek88 4y ago
          MSA is Modern Standard Arabic to save others a google!
  • muzani 4y ago
    I don't understand much Arabic, but I know the alphabet almost as well as the Latin alphabet. If you see something in Latin along the lines of "svciwbc oaoøoaaö", and claims to be Gaelic or whatever, you'll know that something is off - the consonants and vowels just don't work that way. It won't fool the people who can speak the language, but I think the website is just designed to educate people so that it doesn't look like complete nonsense. Facebook is surprisingly an offender here. It's common to mix both Arabic and Latin, say, begin with بسم الله and then write the text, sometimes in english, and it'll throw off the alignment of the text completely. You get the Latin words right aligned or the Arabic one left aligned. Edit: I'm actually quite surprised how well HN handles this.
    • Zuiii 4y ago
      HN - thankfully - sends text (mostly) unmolested to browsers which generally tend to handle arabic substrings correctly (assuming the page encoding supports it). HN /could/ make it better by setting css auto directionality for all <p>s, but that would be antithetical to its goals as a English-written forum.
  • braingenious 4y ago
    >'two billion people can read the Arabic alphabet to some degree' is a weird claim. Not really, because >there aren't two billion people with functional Arabic literacy. isn’t something that the author claimed. “To some degree” is a phrase that explicitly states that the author isn’t talking about full functional literacy. It would be a super weird claim if “some degree” and “full functional literacy” meant the same thing, but they don’t! You would almost have to intentionally ignore the meaning of the words the author used and invent a nonexistent overlap of meaning to become confused on this point!
    • wruza 4y ago
      Exactly. That would be just a subtle exaggeration based on a pseudo-claim, to some degree.
    • Dylan16807 4y ago
      > 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 literal, but I think including me in a persuasive claim about people that use Arabic would not be appropriate at all. > You would almost have to No need to be rude.
      • braingenious 4y ago
        >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 trying to sneak past you with his clever trick of speaking in plain english?
        • 4y ago
  • chakintosh 4y ago
    > You could have script that is justified right-to-left and with letters correctly connected and it still be gibberish. That just simply means you can't read arabic. You absolutely do not need to vowels to be able to read arabic, if you know the language, you know the vocabulary and know how a word should be pronounced. The vowels are there to aid in clarity. In most cases one single vowel could outright turn a word into its own antonym. And right now, 99% of arabic text is written without vowels apart from Quran and literary works.
  • icemelt8 4y ago
    [dead]
  • tialaramex 4y ago
    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 "can read Polish to some degree". If you show me a Polish street address, and then some street signs, I can spot when the sign matches the address, because I understand that symbols which are slightly different just mean the same thing. If you give me Polish mirror writing, I know it's wrong - it's backwards, even though I don't understand it. 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. Are the symbols backwards? Or maybe they're different symbols which just look backwards. The layer beneath this by the way is recognition that intent exists. If you show me Chinese text I not only can't read it I'm not sure which symbols are "the same" and which are not, however I can immediately tell this is writing. The writer intended to convey meaning with these shapes, perhaps I can find somebody else to translate them for me. Whereas say, the pattern on my duvet is just a pretty pattern, it doesn't mean anything (yes, I have thought about this, no it isn't a secret messsage) and so I can't get that "translated".
    • poulpy123 4y ago
      > 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
    • thaumasiotes 4y ago
      > 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
  • bombcar 4y ago
    Let's assume there's a correct "brand" for Coca Cola in Arabic (I have no idea if there is, but I'm sure there's some large brand that was localized) - there will certainly be a very large number of people who recognize that brand name, even if they cannot read, and will recognize it if you break it, just like someone with no literacy at all can recognize something is broke if they see a coke can labelled LOCA CACO.
• rippercushions 4y ago
  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 looks plausible to non-Arabic speakers.
  • SamBam 4y ago
    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 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 no e's in it, it's probably not English."
    • ramin_hal9001 4y ago
      > 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." This is true. You should also be able to see the word "the" in several places in English text, and if it is rendered as "ehT" or something like that, the ligature code may have a bug -- similar with reversing the ال (read as "al") pattern. > I can't read Arabic but I can recognize that pattern. I went to https://www.bbc.com/arabic https://www.bbc.com/arabic and could find numerous occurrences. Really? I only ever learned to read just enough Arabic to read parts of the Quor'an and am by no means fluent, but I couldn't see any mistakes on that website myself.
      • Nition 4y ago
        The comment was that they found numerous cases of ال, not ل ا.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• Causality1 4y ago
  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.
  • Cyph0n 4y ago
    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 worry about the dialect of your target audience.
    • james-redwood 4y ago
      I pity the poor dev who has a Moroccan co-worker that helpfully offers to translate their application into darija thinking it’s Arabic
      • curiousgal 4y ago
        Tangent: I hate how Moroccans monopolized the word darija to mean "Moroccan Arabic". Every country in North Africa calls their own language darija!
    • poulpy123 4y ago
      Do you know why levantine arabic is more used for dubbing ?
      • Cyph0n 4y ago
        My understanding is that it’s simply because they were among the first to setup dedicated dubbing studios.
• olliej 4y ago
  The core issue is people without familiarity with how non-native (to them) script can function - in the English centric world it means assuming one letter == one visual glyph, and the visual glyph won't get a different rendering depending on context. Native English speakers don't seem to really acknowledge that the English alphabet does have contextually different glyphs for the same letter: that is what capitalization is (and applies to other latin descended scripts). Of course single character = single glyph equivalence fails for many latin descended scripts 'ss' vs 'ß', 'ij' vs 'ÿ'. This is entirely ignoring accented letters which break anglo-centric "single code point == single character" equivalence (though this is more understood). People often think text layout is "easy" because they don't consider how anything other than their common experience treats thing (the reality is there still isn't a good vertical text layout story on the web). This is also demonstrated whenever people go "I'll handle text layout myself", because they think one key press = one character, and immediately break text entry for more than half the world.
  • least 4y ago
    > The core issue is people without familiarity with how non-native (to them) script can function - in the English centric world it means assuming one letter == one visual glyph, and the visual glyph won't get a different rendering depending on context. English has cursive and I think most English speakers are at least aware of cursive. We have script that is designed for print as well, though, while Arabic script does not; it is always cursive.
    • andsoitis 4y ago
      Some have developed non-cursive Arabic script, but it hasn’t taken off. For instance, the Simplified Arabic Alphabet was devised by Muhammad Shakeel as an alternative way to write Arabic. It is a non-cursive alphabetical script as opposed to the traditional cursive Arabic abjad. The letter shapes are based mostly on the early Arabic Jazm script. It is not connected to or inspired by Nasri Khattar's Unified Arabic script. https://omniglot.com/conscripts/saa.htm https://omniglot.com/conscripts/saa.htm
      • 4y ago
• IIAOPSW 4y ago
  naive question. Is there an arabic equiv of a 7 segment display? It looks like a writing system that is very amenable to that sort of digitization. Always a center line, and then up to two strokes going {up, down, diagonal, curved} intersecting at the {left, middle right} of the main line, followed by some dots to further specify a sub-category. Seems like a small finite set of graphical components being composed together. Which in fairness describes any writing system, but this one seems to have a very simple and predictable stroke sub-alphabet (I mean that as high praise not as a slight, simplicity is good). Am I wrong? What does a simple Arabic digital display look like? I've never seen one.
  • anonu 4y ago
    Numbers will typically be rendered in Arabic numerals and not in Arabic script if a 7 segment display is being used. Latin characters are already pretty difficult to read on a 7 segment... Arabic would be even more difficult.
    • IIAOPSW 4y ago
      That's not entirely what I meant by my question. Let me try rephrasing. Is there a thing that works on the same principle as a 7 segment display, possibly with a more than 7 segments but still a manageable amount, which is designed to display Arabic characters with a similar amount of legibility?
      • anonu 4y ago
        I've never seen anything like that. But I have seen dot matrix displays render Arabic script
      • junon 4y ago
        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 matrix displays, which act more like normal displays. This is because even though it is an alphabetic script, the blending between characters is non-trivial and highly dependent on the sequence of glyphs, which causes an explosion of possible combinations depending on what's being written. That said, you can always design segmented displays that show _any_ shape or script, assuming you don't need to change them.
• habibur 4y ago
  When you doubt, use google translate instead of randomly hitting the keyboard.
  • reaperducer 4y ago
    According to the professional translators I work with, the results would be the same.
    • Semaphor 4y ago
      We just had a hilarious/sad case in German public media where it seemed like Google Translate was used for "plant shaped C4 charges" which resulted in a translation for "plant-shaped" instead of "planting shaped" [0] and then asked an expert how realistic it is that C4 was disguised as plants… [0]: https://translate.google.com/?sl=en&tl=de&text=plant%20shaped%20C4%20charges&op=translate https://translate.google.com/?sl=en&tl=de&text=plant%20shape...
      • numpad0 4y ago
        I think the parent is meant to say that MTs are only good as randomly hitting the keyboard to professional eyes... But besides, I doubt "plant shaped C4" contains enough information to guarantee a correct answer in that case. Trying partial sentences and/or individual words through (human or machine) translations don't go well.
        • Semaphor 4y ago
          Yeah, you are right, for some reason I thought I was replying to grandparent. Removed the "maybe not" as I meant to agree with parent. The plant shaped was not a fragment, but the whole text, this has a screenshot [0]. It was about fact-checking the Seymour Hersh Nordstream 2 article. [0] https://nitter.librenode.org/Samy_t42/status/1628793121965211649 https://nitter.librenode.org/Samy_t42/status/162879312196521...
    • slim 4y ago
      because when you copy/paste into your editor that does not support arabic, the text gets scrambled. one trick is to check if the text looks the same as in google translate after you pasted it
• anonu 4y ago
  The question should be more precise. Is this Arabic script? There's a half dozen languages at least that are not Arabic but use Arabic script, such as Persian or Urdu. The typographic rules mentioned still apply though.
  • least 4y ago
    I also thought it might've been about the differences between them, given that Pashto has its own characters unique to its script and Arabic has diacritic marks not used by Farsi or Pahto. This is a different subject, though, that has little to do with what the post is complaining about. Their grievances apply to all scripts based on Arabic.
  • mcswell 4y ago
    Urdu (and IIRC Western Punjabi, i.e. Punjabi as spoken/written in Pakistan) prefer to use the Nasta'liq variety of Arabic script, and historically Persian (Farsi) was written in Nasta'liq. And it is not the case that Nasta'liq is written on a base line--in fact, characters in a word tend to slant down to the left.
  • rahimiali 4y ago
    One of the three rules on the page do not apply to either Persian or Urdu. The article “Al” isn’t used in them, so the third rule doesn’t apply.
• anonu 4y ago
  > to almost 2 billion people. There are probably 350 million Arabic speakers.
  • petesergeant 4y ago
    I was under the impression that Muslims were meant to be able to read the Qur’an phonetically, or at least the first chapter.
    • nraf 4y ago
      Many (most?) Muslims will have memorised the first chapter, and probably at least the last three chapters of the Qur'an. Reading isn't a requirement however, many children (Arabs and non-Arabs) will memorise those chapters verbally well before they learn how to read.
  • frogulis 4y ago
    Not sure why this is being downvoted - a quick Google search gives me numbers ranging from 250-450 million, and 350 million sits comfortably within that range. It's possible that the article refers to the number of readers of Arabic script in any language, which I imagine would be a bigger number.
    • cyborgx7 4y ago
      > Not sure why this is being downvoted Because it's comparing the wrong numbers. The article specifies what the 2 million refers to: "Here's a 18 minute video of I talk I gave at XOXO in 2015 that'll teach you more than enough Arabic to not embarrass yourself in front of everyone who can read the Arabic alphabet to some degree. That's about 2 billion people, or 28% of the human population, and they will absolutely notice that you don't know what you're doing and laugh at you in languages you cannot even read."
  • mcswell 4y ago
    He's not talking about Arabic speakers, he's talking about people who can read (to some extent) the Arabic script. This would include speakers of Urdu, Western Punjabi, Pashto, Dari, Farsi and many other (smaller) languages. He may also be talking about Muslims who can sound out the Arabic text of the Koran, even if they don't understand it--a skill which, from what I understand, is valued among Muslims.
• Ozzie_osman 4y ago
  "Why not just..." train a neural net to detect this? :)
• geraneum 4y ago
  > for example Farsi in Egypt (Egyptians primarily speak an Egyptian Dialect of Arabic) Nit picking here maybe, but neither Farsi (Persian) is a dialect of Arabic (not even in the same family of languages) nor Egyptians speak it typically. Although, they speak a dialect of Arabic. Update: My mistake, as pointed out here, I misunderstood the point initially.
  • sunir 4y ago
    I believe that was the exact point the article was making.
  • frogulis 4y ago
    Yup, that's the exact point they're making. Non-Arabic-speaker sees Arabic script and assumes it's the Arabic language, so presents it to users that don't understand it, such as presenting Farsi text to Egyptian Arabic speakers. Or, to take the Latin script example, presenting French text to English speakers.
    • throwntoday 4y ago
      Well as the Persian and Arabic alphabet are nearly identical, unicode doesn't appear to store two distinct copies, instead just storing one plus the additional characters for Persian. Oddly though, it stores several copies of identical chinese characters. Traditional, simplified, and the Japanese loaned characters kanji.
      • jcranmer 4y ago
        > Oddly though, it stores several copies of identical chinese characters. Traditional, simplified, and the Japanese loaned characters kanji. Actually, all of those characters are usually unified into one code point. This is controversial enough on its own that there's a Wikipedia page on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification
      • throwaway290 4y ago
        > Traditional, simplified, and the Japanese loaned characters kanji. Traditional, simplified, Japanese, Korean. Some are identical, some different. I wonder why these rendering details were not left to fonts and you can type 雨 and ⾬ for example. Maybe stronger presence of those countries in whatever SDOs and tech integration has to do with it.
• agolio 4y ago
  Probably a good place to ask: I want to add an arabic translation to a webpage I operate. My text editor is a bit confused by the unicode symbols. Obviously the text editor displays left-to-right no matter what as it's made for programming. What's the right way to handle this?
  • least 4y ago
    This might provide some insight for setting up your editor [1]. W3C has guidelines for localization [2] and for using RTL script online [3]. [1] http://andreasmhallberg.github.io/typing-arabic-in-vim/ http://andreasmhallberg.github.io/typing-arabic-in-vim/ [2] https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-html-language-declarations https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-html-language-... [3] https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-html-dir https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-html-dir
  • slim 4y ago
    I recommend using gedit for this use case (available for linux and mac) it has the best support for arabic, right to left script and bidi (that's mixing rtl and ltr in the same sentence) I've ever seen
    • slim 4y ago
      also I would be happy to help you support arabic in your webpage. send me an email slim@pirate.tn
    • Symbiote 4y ago
      Kate (KDE's editor) is also fine.
  • skrebbel 4y ago
    If the editor only has trouble displaying Arabic and does not somehow mess with the unicode representation then you should be fine. Ie you could paste an Arabic string into a JSON file, it might look like shit, but should still render correctly in your app or website (assuming you set the text direction or language properties right) And you can always double check in a different editor to be sure nothing gets messed up. I use VS Code which, likely because its browser based, seems to get it right as well.
• reaperducer 4y ago
  You've never had to worry about copy-pasting destroying your text between two programs Actually, yes. Yes I do. Try having to work in documents that trade text in multiple languages between Adobe Acrobat, and Microsoft Office. Add in some opinions from iOS, and I end up pasting text into a blank ASCII file just to get it back to basics so I can send it to the next program because neither Microsoft nor Adobe can reliably handle the macOS standard Command-Shift-V to paste text unformatted. I can't imagine the disaster that would await me if i also has to do it in Arabic.
• techaqua 4y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jawi_script.
  • slim 4y ago
    this applies to those languages as well
    • friendlyHornet 4y ago
      And also Aramaic dialects like Syriac Syriac script looks completely different to Arabic but has the same issues when rendered
    • areyousure 4y ago
      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 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!)
  • LanceH 4y ago
    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.
    • FlyingSnake 4y ago
      > Trying to read Farsi Wait till you discover Urdu, which confuses Farsi speakers even more. For extra fun try the Nastaliq script.
    • 4y ago
• kmeisthax 4y ago
  >Bonus 'I hate it' points if it's that Arabic-looking font that's just English text that looks kind of Arabic. There's a faux-katakana font someone used for the titles on an otherwise amazing album of some FM synth Touhou remixes[0] that hardcore fucks with my brain. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24x3AL7yMX0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24x3AL7yMX0
  • bombcar 4y ago
    There's a whole subculture of using Cyrillic to make "Russian-sounding" things but it's just English with reversed letters. Hilariously amusing to anyone who knows any Cyrillic language.
• fortran77 4y ago
  It's possible in Photoshop if you have some settings wrong to copy/past Hebrew (and probably other Right-to-Left languages like Arabic) and have it show up reversed. This has led to some unfortunate tattoos: https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2431265-mario-mandzukics-hebrew-tattoo-is-grammatically-wrong-and-written-backwards https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2431265-mario-mandzukics...
• vishnuharidas 4y ago
  This reminds me of an Arabic client who wanted both English and Arabic version of the app. I sent him a spreadsheet with 2 cols, with English on one column, and another empty column where I expected him to fill the Arabic translation. He replied with a plaint .txt file with a couple of Arabic lines in it, with a message saying "I translated some of those text from your excel sheet, please go ahead and use this text, I will send the rest by tomorrow". Nobody understood which translated to which.
• nektro 4y ago
  great post, really informative. especially the other links mentioned
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• andrewmcwatters 4y ago
  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.
  • james-redwood 4y ago
    Two billion people can read it to some degree because of Islam. A minority of them actually use the script to write things daily. And there are plenty of people other than this guy making contributions to it, you’ve only just read a singular post by a single person outlining his most common gripes with companies that do not consult native speakers for their translations. It’s not an exhaustive list of people working in the sphere. Imagine if you read a blog post by Linus Torvalds, and thought: ‘wow, it’s crazy that no one else is making contributions to this cool open source kernel?’ - that’s exactly what you’ve done in your comment.
    • fsckboy 4y ago
      >A minority of them actually use the script to write things daily. how do I interpret that? something like "hundreds of millions of arabs constitute a minority of 2 billion"? or are you saying that vast majorities in the arab countries don't use arabic script to write things daily?
  • khaled 4y ago
    There is 99% chance the software you are reading text on right now uses HarfBuzz to lay out the text, a library written mainly by a Persian person. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarfBuzz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarfBuzz
    • saagarjha 4y ago
      I believe that’s the specific guy that was referenced.
      • khaled 4y ago
• dmolony 4y ago
  > I hope this will you help in case you cannot afford to hire anyone at all with a elementary school level of Arabic script reading. Oops.
  • raisin_churn 4y ago
    That is probably in the top 3 most common English typos, made millions or billions of times a day by native English speakers, up to and including people with PhDs. The issue the author is complaining about is completely different.
  • junon 4y ago
    I'm confused, are you implying a simple mistake made by natives all the time means the author should be outright discredited or something?
• marmee 4y ago
  > Photoshop breaks Arabic. We even have a website that will break our Arabic so that Photoshop breaks it back to normal. Yes, Adobe is aware. No, they do not care. Photoshop since time immemorial had a Middle East edition (ME) which supported RTL and used to curb piracy I don’t know how it’s with their new pseudo-sass but I think they integrated it into their main product
  • khaled 4y ago
    Photoshop relatively recently consolidated its text layout into a single layout engine (based on HarfBuzz) and Arabic support no longer an opt-in (which was the source of the trouble, you had to know you need to opt-in Arabic support before installing the application) https://helpx.adobe.com/lv/photoshop/using/unified-text-engine.html https://helpx.adobe.com/lv/photoshop/using/unified-text-engi...
  • chakintosh 4y ago
    Oh man. I remember from 15 years ago or so when I used to struggle with arabic script, would often resort to writing in another software and exporting it to PNG or EPS in order to use it in PS. Luckily, there was a 3rd party add-on that fixed that issue.
• LanceH 4y ago
  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, though it is genderless. The o with dots attached or not to the word on the right indicates feminine gender.
  • pezezin 4y ago
    Incidentally you can find the "al" in many words of Arabic origin like alchemy, algebra, algorithm or alcohol.
• fatih-erikli 4y ago
  Do arabic peoples seek the videos from right to left too? If not, would they want?
  • shmde 4y ago
    They experience time backwards too.
  • madeofpalk 4y ago
    My understanding, preferably, yes. https://m2.material.io/design/usability/bidirectionality.html#mirroring-layout https://m2.material.io/design/usability/bidirectionality.htm... > 7. Progress bars fill in the same direction as content is read In general, if it represents "start to finish", or it has "forwards or backwards", then it should be mirrored. Above site has good examples for how a bicycle icon should be mirrored (as facing left is going "forwards"), but a magnifying glass would not.
    • fatih-erikli 4y ago
      It's a dilemma, either teaching English to everyone, or recreating the UI style guides from zero point.
• cardiffspaceman 4y ago
  I wrote a note in GMail the other day where I needed a Latin phrase. For accuracy I pasted it from the web page where I found the original. It screwed up the “x height” of the text that followed. And offended my sense of correct typesetting. I had to do the paste via third app maneuver to get my email right. So this is just QoI between two European-biased applications using two European languages that use the same basic writing. So I am disappointed by poor Arabic handling but not surprised.
  • oefnak 4y ago
    Hold shift while pasting (chrome) to paste the text only, no formatting.
    • aprilnya 4y ago
      Ctrl+Shift+V to paste without formatting works almost everywhere, not just Chrome
      • djrockstar1 4y ago
        Except Microsoft Word, which for some god forsaken reason demands you do Ctrl+V, Ctrl, T.
    • Dalewyn 4y ago
      Or just copypasta through Notepad (or your favorite Linux equivalent) for a universal formatting-stripping solution.
      • Dylan16807 4y ago
        I don't know about "just" for a solution that more than doubles the number of steps.
        • TeMPOraL 4y ago
          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.
• noufalibrahim 4y ago
  The main thing here is knowledge of the language. Given how widespread Arabic is (though perhaps not so much in the gaming ecosystem which is Rami's area), it makes sense to have someone on the team knowledgeable about the language while doing translations. I encountered a (sort of) similar problem while rendering Devanagari text and wouldn't have realised If I couldn't read the text https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44254171/devanagari-text-rendering-improperly-in-pygame https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44254171/devanagari-text...
  • haditab 4y ago
    Although I’ve never tried it, I can’t imagine it would be that difficult to find an editor for the specific language to take a look at it. I doubt they need that many hours of work from the editor for it to be a significant expense.
  • redbell 4y ago
    > it makes sense to have someone on the team knowledgeable about the language while doing translations Speaking about translations, I had. Laughable experience when I was experimenting with Google translate API a few years ago, when I picked some random text about solar system from Wikipedia that reads something like “Mercury is a planet of the solar system”, when translated to Arabic, it read “الزئبق هو أحد كواكب المجموعة الشمسية” , apparently, it was not be able to infer the meaning of “Mercury” from the context.
    • jamiek88 4y ago
      When I translate that with safari it comes back as ‘mercury is one of the planets in the solar system’?
      • khaled 4y ago
        In Arabic, Mercury (planet) and mercury (element) are two different words (عطارد and زئبق), here the machine translation is using the wrong mercury for the context.
      • 4y ago
• Dylan16807 4y ago
  > Bonus 'I hate it' points if it's that Arabic-looking font that's just English text that looks kind of Arabic. How is a tacky font on some text that was never intended to be Arabic even approaching the badness of these other issues, let alone worse? Or is the worry you've found a person that doesn't understand different languages exist at all?
  • ketzo 4y ago
    I think it's extra insulting when someone uses a font that's just supposed to look Arabic I have definitely seen attempts at a "global-looking" interface where fake languages were put on screen using plausible-looking fonts. Like, imagine a welcome page with "hello!" in lots of different languages, but the Arabic/Urdu/Armenian/Thai characters are all just literal gibberish that looks kind of like the alphabets in question.
    • Dylan16807 4y ago
      Is the context just "places that are clearly supposed to be Arabic"? Sure, I can understand that being a problem. But if the font is being used as a font I don't think it should be a big deal.
    • imiric 4y ago
      We're talking about style at that point. If someone is using those fonts to pass text off as being in a different language, as in the example you mention, then sure, that's egregious. If, however, the font is use to render some text in the style of another language, then I don't see a problem with it. We've done the same with Greek, Russian, Japanese, and many other languages that have a distinctive script. Sometimes it's tacky, but I wouldn't call it insulting.
• mehdix 4y ago
  Also note that much like Latin script, many different languages use variations of Arabic script. The most notable one would be Persian.
  • redbell 4y ago
    I’d like to add Urdu to the list of languages that are written in Arabic letters.
• ahmetnoid 4y ago
  I watched the video at the bottom of the page, and it was all fun and I did laugh. But you lost me at the difference between ق and ك (q and k respectively) They are different sounds and do not have the same pronunciation.
• azubinski 4y ago
  I wonder if there is something like "Help! Is this Canadian French?" on the Arabic Internet?
• 7373737373 4y ago
  I hope someone creates something similar for distinguishing southeast asian scripts. Would be very useful for GeoGuessr
  • TacoSteemers 4y ago
    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.
    • 7373737373 4y ago
      I'm not sure how popular these are, so I guess if the explanation included that fact it'd be even better!
  • schoen 4y ago
    A good start is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Language_recognition_chart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Language_recognition... although it's pretty weak on Southeast Asia in particular.
    • joveian 4y ago
      That is interesting. I happened to notice that some described ligatures under Dutch aren't appearing for me for some reason. I've been thinking about font rendering in different scripts lately since I like the DejaVu fonts but unfortunately the project was abandoned a while ago and coverage is incomplete in many areas. With other more complete fonts available these days it seems likely to be better to use a more restricted version of the fonts to allow fallback to the more complete scripts, although I'm not sure how well the unicode blocks match actual usage. It is easier than ever to mix languages but still hard to know if you are messing them up. I found out my terminal was rendering Japanese wrong when someone posted this link recently: https://heistak.github.io/your-code-displays-japanese-wrong/ https://heistak.github.io/your-code-displays-japanese-wrong/ Now it displays Chinese wrong.
• throwbadubadu 4y ago
  Nice to have some smoke tests, but wondering about minor details in the first things always undermines credibility for me quickly: > The text is rendered left-to-right, instead of right-to-left. siht ekil daer ot gnivah ekil s'tI! But the text (the arabic one) is not rendered in different direction bad vs good version? So this is just alignment? I can understand this still is very annoying and triggering, but not as bad as needing to read the other direction?!
  • aprilnya 4y ago
    The image at the top only talks about alignment, the point you quoted is separate from that and talks about when it’s actually rendered reversed which does happen
  • Narishma 4y ago
    What text are you talking about?
• unconed 4y ago
  >that would rather insult a tenth of the human population than actually pay to have someone who knows the language look at it. I am unsurprised that a website by Rami Ismail uses collective offense-taking as its frame, and uses it to try shaming companies into giving money to non-westerners or adjacent. It's not automatically insulting to misrender arabic, any more than it is insulting to read hilariously mis/autotranslated "chinglish" in China, or see comically offensive English tshirt slogans in Japan. Depending on context it could even be an attempt at being _nice_ that just misfired. A simpler explanation and frame is that text rendering is tough enough as it is, and a solution that works perfectly fine for one market won't scale to everywhere. Arabic in particular is very hard, not just because of ligatures, but because right-to-left text is actually bidirectional in practice. They might've even asked an Arabic speaker to review, but it may have looked okay right until the very last step in the production pipeline, when it got mangled.
• 8organicbits 4y ago
  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 right. But an Arabic reader will naturally read the form as an Arabic form with an English translation off to the left. Neither language is dominant. Contrast this with a form in English and Spanish, where you need to put the text all on the left and decide which language goes on top.
  • NhanH 4y ago
    Your text inputs still need to flow either left-to-right or right-to-left though? In which use case would this be useful?
    • AdamN 4y ago
      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.
    • 8organicbits 4y ago
      If we're talking about an HTML text input field, you can use `dir=auto`. Other tools should have similar features. This approach is also very common on paper, which naturally flows in the correct direction. https://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_global_dir.asp https://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_global_dir.asp https://caniuse.com/mdn-html_global_attributes_dir https://caniuse.com/mdn-html_global_attributes_dir Edit: oh use case? Imagine a PDF form you'd like someone to fill out, or a page that may get printed. You could create two forms and let the person filling out the form pick their language, but the person processing the form may prefer to read the form in the other language.
    • IanCal 4y ago
      > 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.
• mcv 4y ago
  I'm surprised that this is still such a big issue. I'd expect with unicode standards, this should handle well out of the box. Ages ago, in 2005 or thereabouts, I was working on a website for a Jewish organisation. I don't know Hebrew, but Hebrew has many of these same issues, including the right-to-left direction, and I was quite surprised to see text from our own CMS, based on Java, with tons of XML pipelines (Cocoon! XSLT!) generating HTML to be viewed in a browser, just handled this correctly without any problems. At least the text was right-to-left, which was the only thing I knew, but the customer presumably knew more and they were happy. Though selecting text in a mixed left-to-right and right-to-left piece of text looks really weird. Not sure what we did with alignment there, but I vaguely recall that everything may have been centered. An ugly compromise perhaps, but centering text was still popular at the time.
  • azernik 4y ago
    For the most part, these problems only pop up when you try to render RTL text visually, and then copy it back out from UI elements. In internal pipelines, however, it's just another string of opaque bytes that you perform a few very well-specified standard library operations on. (Arabic also has the connection challenge, which Hebrew does not, but usually renderers that do RTL right also handle the ligatures.
• 8organicbits 4y ago
  One thing missing is to read the docs of your UI framework. I handled translations for a Windows tool 15 years ago. Windows docs were great at explaining what to do. I found an Arabic speaker to check my work and we had it right on the first attempt. I wonder how hard it would be on other more modern platforms.
• martopix 4y ago
  I remember the student union at the university of Edinburgh having massive welcome signs printed on a wall in all languages, and the Arabic one very clearly had the mistake in the points 2 and 3. Printed on a wall. It was very clear to me even though I don't speak a word of Arabic.
  • ta1243 4y ago
    Mistranslations are always a source of amusement http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7702913.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7702913.stm > When officials asked for the Welsh translation of a road sign, they thought the reply was what they needed. > Unfortunately, the e-mail response to Swansea council said in Welsh: "I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated".
    • zirgs 4y ago
      Wouldn't it make sense for translators to send messages like that in multiple languages?
  • jcuenod 4y ago
    At the end of the "It's a small world" ride at Disney, FL, there's a sign in Zulu that translates to "goodbye". But in Zulu, how you say goodbye depends on whether the person you're saying goodbye to is staying or going. The sign at the ride says goodbye as though the rider is staying (implying that the ride is leaving).
• imwillofficial 4y ago
  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.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    > 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.
    • imwillofficial 4y ago
      This is a poor assumption. 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.
• codetrotter 4y ago
  I like the URL of the tool they linked to. http://www.arabic-keyboard.org/photoshop-arabic/ http://www.arabic-keyboard.org/photoshop-arabic/ When reading the URL, I imagine an Arabic language called “Photoshop Arabic”, which came into being at the Photoshop team in Adobe XD - Do you speak Arabic? - Arabic is not just one language. - Yeah, but do you speak an Arabic language? - Yeah, I speak Photoshop Arabic.
• beeforpork 4y ago
  م‎ر‎ح‎ب‎اً‎!
• einpoklum 4y ago
  Note that: 1. There are several languages which (sometimes) use the Arabic script, but are not Arabic, like Kurdish, Turkish up until a century ago, Javanese etc. 2. Farsi sort-uses the Arabic script, with some glyphs unique to it ... so things can be more complex than just deciding "Is it Arabic?" . But I like the website! ---- Right-to-Left languages with non-Arabic script are also often similarly mis-rendered. I'd given the more popular scripts as an example, like N'Ko and Adlam, but almost nobody in the West bothers to print those, plus I'm not familiar enough with them; so - Hebrew: In the disconnected-form script, here's Hello: שלום עולם (sounds like: shalom) do you see the squarish glyph at the end of each of these words? That's the final-form Mem consonant. But in the beginning or the middle of the word, its glyph is מ. So if you see: םולש that means someone printed it in left-to-right order of glyphs instead of right-to-left. ----- These issues come up a lot in our LibreOffice RTL languages user group on Telegram: https://t.me/+GY3UwBnlDN9mY2M8 https://t.me/+GY3UwBnlDN9mY2M8 and if you're particularly interested in Arabic, there's the Arabic-issues-specific group: https://t.me/LibreOffice_Arabic https://t.me/LibreOffice_Arabic
• disintegrator 4y ago
  Tangentially, for those doing web development, CSS has a bunch of "logical" properties [1] that adapt to the locale of the user agent. For example, you can swap out `margin-left` and `margin-bottom` in your CSS with `margin-inline-start` and `margin-block-end` respectively. Similarly, `text-align` accepts start/end instead of left/right. Even if you're not targetting right-to-left or top-to-bottom locales, it's easy enough to switch to logical properties and get most of the work out of the way if you change your mind in the future. [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Logical_Properties https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Logical...
  • lelandfe 4y ago
    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 need to flip sizing values for RTL/LTR, but that's at least useful)
    • H8crilA 4y ago
      Japanese is actually top to bottom, but they largely gave up on that idea. Probably too much hassle.
      • irrational 4y ago
        But, there are still texts that are read top to bottom. I only know that because my daughter has a Japanese friend and she has shown me some of her books and how they are read top to bottom.
      • tmtvl 4y ago
        Same with Mongolian, but JP goes TBRL (Top to Bottom, Right to Left), Mongolian goes TBLR. Wikipedia has an overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_system#Directionality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_system#Directionality
• cyborgx7 4y ago
  I was aware of this problem because I follow Rami Ismail for his game development and this site reminded me of him. Then I get to the bottom and it turns out it was made by him. Glad to see he is still fighting the good fight.
• fjfaase 4y ago
  I once had to implement Arabic support in an existing editor. It also had to support mixed RTL and LTR input. Interesting to see how the cursors walks differently through the text when going going forward and backwards and how text selection works. Most document editors (MS Word, Libre Office with CTL, for example) and browsers implement this correcly as well. So, you can just compare if a text is displayed correctly by comparing how it looks in a document editor or a text box in an HTML file.
• vanderZwan 4y ago
  > 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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph)
• nilslindemann 4y ago
  Help! Is this horizontal scrolling?