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>'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 Arabi

>'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?
  - bqmjjx0kac 4y ago
    Suppose I said, "It's important to protect endangered species. There are 130 billion mammals on Earth." It's plain English, but I picked the wrong measure to support my claim.
    - braingenious 4y ago
      Your analogy is backwards. It’s more like the author said “This is good for all mammals” and you are the one that inserted “but there exists a smaller subset of mammals”, which is entirely orthogonal to the point.
      - bqmjjx0kac 4y ago
        The author's thesis is that Arabic text is important because two billion people recognize its alphabet. This fact is irrelevant because it's a proper superset of the group that matters: people who can read Arabic. Let me try a different analogy. "It's important for caterers in the US to provide a gluten-free meal choice. After all, the population is 332 million!" Without knowing the incidence of gluten sensitivity, it's a borderline-misleading statistic.
        braingenious 4y ago
        I am glad that we agree that this article that referred to people with varying degrees of knowledge of Arabic script is not, in fact, about people that are fluent. I also agree that the existence of a subset that wasn’t referred to at all in the article is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand!
        Dylan16807 4y ago
        The article strongly implies that the "some degree" group is the group that matters. But it's not. The group that matters is somewhere in between "some degree" and "fluent". And the parent comment was not talking about fluent people when writing "can read".
- zarzavat 4y ago
  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 claim that there's ~2 billion people who are literate in Arabic script and will laugh at you if you get it wrong, is more or less true. It's of course referring to the large number of people who can read from the Quran in Arabic but without understanding all the words.
  - AdamN 4y ago
    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.
    - zarzavat 4y ago
      If it's Quranic Arabic then the orthography includes vowel markings so vocalising it is considerably easier. The number of people who can vocalise Arabic without the vowel marks (e.g. a newspaper) is considerably less. But you don't need to be able to do that to notice any of the errors in the article.
    - jmopp 4y ago
      A quick Google search seems to indicate that there are 1.9 billion Muslims in the world. It makes sense to assume they know enough Arabic to recgonise at the very least common religious set-phrases like the Bismillah or the Shahada. In my book this counts as "some degree of Arabic script literacy"
      - AdamN 4y ago
        You'd have to exclude everybody under 7 or so, everybody who is illiterate (in this very expansive sense), and those that are Muslim but do not read Arabic and do everything in translation. That might be a small group though and probably outweighed by all the non-Muslim Arabic readers (for instance I work with 2 Egyptians, one is Coptic and one is ex-Muslim and both can easily read Arabic).
- tsukikage 4y ago
  > pump up the numbers in a misleading way Is it misleading? You don't have to be anything like fluent to realise when text rendering is broken. The quantity that is actually relevant to the discussion is the number of people who, when they look at your UI, will know that the arabic text rendering is broken; not the number of people who are fluent in arabic.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    The only reason for me to care that it's broken is on behalf of the people that can read it. So even though I know a single digit number of words, and you can count me in that two billion, nobody should care about getting it right on my behalf.
    - foldr 4y ago
      >The only reason for me to care that it's broken is on behalf of the people that can read it. The people who can't read it, but who can see that it's broken, will form a lower opinion of your product. It's as if I went to a Polish website and the text was all right-aligned and in all caps. I can't read Polish at all, but I'd still form an opinion about the quality of the site.
      - Dylan16807 4y ago
        I'm not sure if you were trying to disagree with me, but I agree. They will form a lower opinion, but they form that opinion almost entirely because of the people that actually should be able to read it. If you screw up a language that has 0 readers, it matters far less. The point of saying how many speakers there are was to increase the strength of that effect. Because of that, it's misleading if you pump up the number. For pumping it up to not matter, the number would have to not matter, and there wouldn't have been a reason to mention it in the first place.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  This doesn't make any sense. Why would you want the meaning of "some degree of knowledge" and "full functional literacy" to be close? What's misleading about describing exactly what you're talking about? Who cares how many people are literate in Arabic in this context? What you care about is how many people know enough about Arabic to know that you don't know anything about Arabic. You seem to be demanding that "people who know enough medical terminology and/or Latin to see through your fictional doctor" be nearly the same class as "people who are doctors," and what's more, implying that's some sort of deception. > No need to be rude.
kybernetikos 4y ago
Yeah, I think we're talking here about the number of people who will know you messed up rather than the number of people who can actually read the text in your app.

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?
- bqmjjx0kac 4y ago
  Suppose I said, "It's important to protect endangered species. There are 130 billion mammals on Earth." It's plain English, but I picked the wrong measure to support my claim.
  - braingenious 4y ago
    Your analogy is backwards. It’s more like the author said “This is good for all mammals” and you are the one that inserted “but there exists a smaller subset of mammals”, which is entirely orthogonal to the point.
    - bqmjjx0kac 4y ago
      The author's thesis is that Arabic text is important because two billion people recognize its alphabet. This fact is irrelevant because it's a proper superset of the group that matters: people who can read Arabic. Let me try a different analogy. "It's important for caterers in the US to provide a gluten-free meal choice. After all, the population is 332 million!" Without knowing the incidence of gluten sensitivity, it's a borderline-misleading statistic.
      - braingenious 4y ago
        I am glad that we agree that this article that referred to people with varying degrees of knowledge of Arabic script is not, in fact, about people that are fluent. I also agree that the existence of a subset that wasn’t referred to at all in the article is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand!
        Dylan16807 4y ago
        The article strongly implies that the "some degree" group is the group that matters. But it's not. The group that matters is somewhere in between "some degree" and "fluent". And the parent comment was not talking about fluent people when writing "can read".
zarzavat 4y ago
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 claim that there's ~2 billion people who are literate in Arabic script and will laugh at you if you get it wrong, is more or less true. It's of course referring to the large number of people who can read from the Quran in Arabic but without understanding all the words.
- AdamN 4y ago
  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.
  - zarzavat 4y ago
    If it's Quranic Arabic then the orthography includes vowel markings so vocalising it is considerably easier. The number of people who can vocalise Arabic without the vowel marks (e.g. a newspaper) is considerably less. But you don't need to be able to do that to notice any of the errors in the article.
  - jmopp 4y ago
    A quick Google search seems to indicate that there are 1.9 billion Muslims in the world. It makes sense to assume they know enough Arabic to recgonise at the very least common religious set-phrases like the Bismillah or the Shahada. In my book this counts as "some degree of Arabic script literacy"
    - AdamN 4y ago
      You'd have to exclude everybody under 7 or so, everybody who is illiterate (in this very expansive sense), and those that are Muslim but do not read Arabic and do everything in translation. That might be a small group though and probably outweighed by all the non-Muslim Arabic readers (for instance I work with 2 Egyptians, one is Coptic and one is ex-Muslim and both can easily read Arabic).
tsukikage 4y ago
> pump up the numbers in a misleading way Is it misleading? You don't have to be anything like fluent to realise when text rendering is broken. The quantity that is actually relevant to the discussion is the number of people who, when they look at your UI, will know that the arabic text rendering is broken; not the number of people who are fluent in arabic.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  The only reason for me to care that it's broken is on behalf of the people that can read it. So even though I know a single digit number of words, and you can count me in that two billion, nobody should care about getting it right on my behalf.
  - foldr 4y ago
    >The only reason for me to care that it's broken is on behalf of the people that can read it. The people who can't read it, but who can see that it's broken, will form a lower opinion of your product. It's as if I went to a Polish website and the text was all right-aligned and in all caps. I can't read Polish at all, but I'd still form an opinion about the quality of the site.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      I'm not sure if you were trying to disagree with me, but I agree. They will form a lower opinion, but they form that opinion almost entirely because of the people that actually should be able to read it. If you screw up a language that has 0 readers, it matters far less. The point of saying how many speakers there are was to increase the strength of that effect. Because of that, it's misleading if you pump up the number. For pumping it up to not matter, the number would have to not matter, and there wouldn't have been a reason to mention it in the first place.
pessimizer 4y ago
This doesn't make any sense. Why would you want the meaning of "some degree of knowledge" and "full functional literacy" to be close? What's misleading about describing exactly what you're talking about? Who cares how many people are literate in Arabic in this context? What you care about is how many people know enough about Arabic to know that you don't know anything about Arabic. You seem to be demanding that "people who know enough medical terminology and/or Latin to see through your fictional doctor" be nearly the same class as "people who are doctors," and what's more, implying that's some sort of deception. > No need to be rude.

kybernetikos 4y ago

Yeah, I think we're talking here about the number of people who will know you messed up rather than the number of people who can actually read the text in your app.