...making Linux just a little more fun!
Rick Moen [rick at linuxmafia.com]
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
MNZ [mnzaki at gmail.com]
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\\
Rick Moen [rick at linuxmafia.com]
Quoting Ben Okopnik (ben@linuxgazette.net):
> Supposedly, out of the 246 million speakers of Arabic worldwide, 206 > million speak and understand it.
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.
MNZ [mnzaki at gmail.com]
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
[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\\
Rick Moen [rick at linuxmafia.com]
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
Ben Okopnik [ben at linuxgazette.net]
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 *