9 ms·

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 funct

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
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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
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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

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.