Tux

...making Linux just a little more fun!

Arabic translation (1)

Rick Moen [rick at linuxmafia.com]


Fri, 18 Jan 2008 12:34:52 -0800

Quoting MNZ (mnzaki@gmail.com):

> I'm a native Arabic speaker. I can go through the translated text and
> check it but I'm terrible at actually typing Arabic and I'm not that
> good at it anyway. I'll help with the translation as much as I can. I'll
> start in a few days though because I have some exams right now.

MNZ, shokran jazeelan!

(Sorry, no, I merely spent a couple of days in Alexandria and Cairo. ;-> I'm just another ignorant Yank, about which, please see .signature block.)

-- 
Cheers,             The genius of you Americans is that you never make 
Rick Moen           clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves 
rick@linuxmafia.com that make us wonder at the possibility that there may be 
                    something to them that we are missing. --Gamel Abdel Nasser

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MNZ [mnzaki at gmail.com]


Sat, 19 Jan 2008 14:32:00 +0200

On Jan 18, 2008 10:34 PM, Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> wrote:

> Quoting MNZ (mnzaki@gmail.com):
>
> > I'm a native Arabic speaker. I can go through the translated text and
> > check it but I'm terrible at actually typing Arabic and I'm not that
> > good at it anyway. I'll help with the translation as much as I can. I'll
> > start in a few days though because I have some exams right now.
>
> MNZ, shokran jazeelan!

You are Welcome!

> (Sorry, no, I merely spent a couple of days in Alexandria and Cairo. ;->
> I'm just another ignorant Yank, about which, please see .signature block.)

Still, a little about everything. Anyway, Arabic is not a very nice language if you ask me. People are actually proud of the fact that it is very difficult and unnecessarily complicated! (though that's not how they'd put it....)

:-) You have to see Arabic movies before you take that for granted........

-- 
//MNZ\\

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Rick Moen [rick at linuxmafia.com]


Thu, 24 Jan 2008 18:39:44 -0800

Quoting Ben Okopnik (ben@linuxgazette.net):

> Supposedly, out of the 246 million speakers of Arabic worldwide, 206
> million speak and understand it. :) I suspect that you know it, but not
> by that name.
> 
> ``
>   Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is the literary standard across the Middle
>   East and North Africa, and one of the official six languages of the
>   United Nations. Most printed matter???including most books, newspapers,
>   magazines, official documents, and reading primers for small children???is
>   written in MSA^[citation needed].
> ''
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_Arabic#Modern_Standard_Arabic

I aspire to speak and write that very language. I'm pitfully far from doing it, at this point, but I'd like to get there.


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MNZ [mnzaki at gmail.com]


Fri, 25 Jan 2008 09:48:21 +0200

On Jan 24, 2008 10:02 PM, Ben Okopnik <ben@linuxgazette.net> wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 22, 2008 at 10:06:01PM +0200, MNZ wrote:
> > On Jan 22, 2008 9:39 PM, Ben Okopnik <ben@linuxgazette.net> wrote:
> > > > Ummm I don't understand what a Latin-Russian converter is exactly.
> > > > Do you mean transliterate from Latin to Russian?
> > >
> > > Latin character set (ISO-8859-1 and such) to Russian, yes.
> >
> > Oh ok. I can imagine how useful that would be! No more hunting for
> > the Arabic letters around the keyboard. Why is it difficult to do it
> > with Arabic? The initial/medial/final thing is just about the shape of
> > the letter (handled by the font, I think) but it's the same letter (same
> > byte).
>
> To get back to this - I'd be glad to do it, given your help. Can you
> come up with a reasonable 1-to-1 mapping? I.e., a parallel set of
> English characters and the hex values for the Arabic ones that would (at
> least mostly) make sense? I've looked at some of the existing ones, and
> most of them do a mix of one- and two-character keys, like
[snip]

> Hopefully, that'll be useful to a lot of folks - and I'd really
> appreciate it if they sent me their mapfiles.

Sure. I'll send you a mapfile when I make one.

>
> > > Kat just mentioned that there's supposed to be a Modern Standard Arabic
> > > (MSA) that's a bit more, well, standardized. I can only imagine that
> > > it's greeted with a mixture of horror (from those who have to learn *yet
> > > another* version in addition to the ones they already know) and relief
> > > (from anyone who has to learn it from scratch.)
> >
> > Well I haven't heard about anything like that and I don't think people will
> > be rushing to learn it :)
>
> Supposedly, out of the 246 million speakers of Arabic worldwide, 206
> million speak and understand it. :) I suspect that you know it, but not
> by that name.
>
> ``
>   Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is the literary standard across the Middle
>   East and North Africa, and one of the official six languages of the
>   United Nations. Most printed matter-including most books, newspapers,
>   magazines, official documents, and reading primers for small children-is
>   written in MSA^[citation needed].
> ''

[LOL] I never knew it had a name. Yes indeed most Arabic speakers can understand and read MSA because basically that's the written Arabic I was talking about. It's quite strange actually how everyone knows it but no one speaks it....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Arabic

-- 
//MNZ\\

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Rick Moen [rick at linuxmafia.com]


Fri, 25 Jan 2008 00:48:43 -0800

Quoting MNZ (mnzaki@gmail.com):

> [LOL] I never knew it had a name. Yes indeed most Arabic speakers can
> understand and read MSA because basically that's the written Arabic I
> was talking about. It's quite strange actually how everyone knows it but
> no one speaks it....
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Arabic

Well, maybe I'm doomed, in aspiring to knowledge of a spoken variant of Arabic that would be OK anywhere it's spoken. I actually should have known, having heard many stories of how odd Syrians sound to Egyptians, and vice-versa -- which is particularly ironic, in their case, given their one-time effort as what was at least hoped to be a single country.

(/me boggles at the number of apparently semi-official subvarieties of ISO 639-3 listed in the Wikipedia link.)

-- 
Cheers,                                      "Reality is not optional."
Rick Moen                                             -- Thomas Sowell
rick@linuxmafia.com

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Ben Okopnik [ben at linuxgazette.net]


Fri, 25 Jan 2008 10:27:39 -0500

On Fri, Jan 25, 2008 at 12:48:43AM -0800, Rick Moen wrote:

> Quoting MNZ (mnzaki@gmail.com):
> 
> > [LOL] I never knew it had a name. Yes indeed most Arabic speakers can
> > understand and read MSA because basically that's the written Arabic I
> > was talking about. It's quite strange actually how everyone knows it but
> > no one speaks it....
> > 
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Arabic
> 
> Well, maybe I'm doomed, in aspiring to knowledge of a spoken variant of
> Arabic that would be OK anywhere it's spoken.  I actually should have 
> known, having heard many stories of how odd Syrians sound to Egyptians,
> and vice-versa -- which is particularly ironic, in their case, given
> their one-time effort as what was at least hoped to be a single country.
> 
> (/me boggles at the number of apparently semi-official subvarieties of 
> ISO 639-3 listed in the Wikipedia link.)

When you consider the mutually-unintelligible varieties of English - e.g., Brooklynese vs. Louisiana "lazy mouth", or Chicano vs. Ebonics - it becomes less startling. Unlike the varieties of Arabic, the base words are (mostly) the same, but watching the 300-car pileup when people try to communicate across those divides can be horrifying and amusing.

-- 
* Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://LinuxGazette.NET *

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