Short questions

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Short questions

Postby Javier » 2009-03-29, 20:25

Sorry if there is already a thread here for short questions, but I couldn't find it. And this is really an insignificant subject but anyway I am very curious about it ...

The point is that in a plane's map (the one that is showing you the actual position) there were Arabic and English translations for the cities' names. So, everything looked normal to me, expect for Larnaka (Cyprus), they had it written ل‍ارنكا and not لارنكا apparently for no reason, because other names containing the ligature لا were displayed correctly. I reckon then it was not a technical problem.

Is it a "normal" thing? Because you need separate the ligature on purpose to have it like that.

Feel free to use the thread to post all those small questions :wink:
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Re: Short questions

Postby Bubulus » 2009-03-30, 0:27

That's very interesting, specially because the Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Persian, Pashto and Urdu Wikipedias all list it as <قبرص>, which is read "qibriṣ" at least in Arabic.

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Re: Short questions

Postby eskandar » 2009-03-30, 1:06

Javier means the city of Larnaca in Cyprus, not the country of Cyprus.

I'm sure it's a technical error of some kind (or perhaps human error), because I have never seen ل‍ا before (except when hand-written by beginning students!) and the Arabic is clearly supposed to be لارناكا with the ligature.
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Re: Short questions

Postby Bubulus » 2009-03-30, 1:12

eskandar wrote:Javier means the city of Larnaca in Cyprus, not the country of Cyprus.

Thank you, I can't believe I could be so blind. :shock:

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Re: Short questions

Postby Javier » 2009-04-16, 12:18

And here I am with another question. I was browsing and found the Qur'anic text attached, it's from Sura 5, المائدة, verse 32. The م and خ in red called my attention as they are small in this superscript style. Are they there just for decoration, or to show the original spelling of the word as it's the case of the dagger alif in دٰلك (in green) or are they supposed to change the way the verse are recited? What about the maddas in red? Thanks.
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Re: Short questions

Postby eskandar » 2009-04-16, 13:14

Where did you find this? If we had some context it might be easier to figure out.
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Re: Short questions

Postby Javier » 2009-04-16, 18:40

eskandar wrote:Where did you find this? If we had some context it might be easier to figure out.

It took me a while because I was just browsing and I had to remember where I was navigating before (no browser history :) ), but here is where I found the e-text.

I came home and compare it with my Qur'aan. To my surprise in the printed edition it looks similar with the small hanging م and خ in the verse 32, but if you look in other verses there are other small letters as well.
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Re: Short questions

Postby eskandar » 2009-04-16, 19:04

I believe these marks only appear in the Qur'an, and help with tajwid (proper recitation of the Qur'an). The miim indicates a waqf lazim (necessary stop, where you pause in recitation). The jiim indicates a waqf mujawwaz (optional stop). There is a short guide to these symbols here. The little alif above the alif maqsura (dotless ya) indicates its pronunciation. I'm not sure about the alif above the dhal in ﺫلك though.
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Re: Short questions

Postby Javier » 2009-04-16, 19:23

Thanks a lot, that solves the mistery of the small letters :). I realized I did a typo as well, it's ج and not خ.

The small alif in ذلك is there to show that it's dhaalik and not dhalik, it's what I've read in some books.

What I cannot realize is what's the purpose of the madda in بَنِیٓ, how is that supposed to be pronounced? I'd say bani'aa, am I right :para: ?
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Re: Short questions

Postby Babelfish » 2009-04-17, 13:52

Wow, I didn't know the Qur'aan had such differences in orthography from Modern Arabic... The dagger alif appears there several times with the fatha above it, final (silent) alif of indefinite objective case not connected to the word (e.g. in نَفْسً ا) :shock:

My guess about بَنِيۤ would be that it's pronounced "banii" normally, and the madda is for some reason used to indicate the long vowel, like the dagger alif inعَلَىٰ. It's just a guess though. I know the word مِئَة can also be writtenمِائَة, so there are probably other such exceptions, especially in Qur'aanic Arabic.

I'd double-check it all against the printed version though... There's this ﭐلْأَرْضِ near the end with the laam and alif improperly connected - should be الأرض but adding the sukuun on the laam breaks up the لا ligature, which is simply a bug in the Arabic rendering engine afaik. So I suspect there may be others...
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Re: Short questions

Postby Javier » 2009-04-17, 14:51

Babelfish wrote:My guess about بَنِيۤ would be that it's pronounced "banii" normally, and the madda is for some reason used to indicate the long vowel, like the dagger alif inعَلَىٰ.

Today I heard a recitation of that verse, and indeed it's pronounced banii with a long i. Then the madda should have a kind of historic role. I was browsing about all possible usages of madda but they only speak about maddas on alif.

Babelfish wrote:I'd double-check it all against the printed version though... There's this ﭐلْأَرْضِ near the end with the laam and alif improperly connected - should be الأرض but adding the sukuun on the laam breaks up the لا ligature, which is simply a bug in the Arabic rendering engine afaik. So I suspect there may be others...

Yes, there are some technical problems in rendering the text, specially with the position of the harakat, they overlap each other. When I copied the text I thought the small subscript and superscript letters and the madda on the yeeh were technical faults, after I compared it with my printed edition of the Qur'aan, I was surprised to see that they were also there. :)
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Re: Short questions

Postby jaybee » 2009-04-17, 21:30

Javier wrote:
Babelfish wrote:My guess about بَنِيۤ would be that it's pronounced "banii" normally, and the madda is for some reason used to indicate the long vowel, like the dagger alif inعَلَىٰ.

Today I heard a recitation of that verse, and indeed it's pronounced banii with a long i. Then the madda should have a kind of historic role. I was browsing about all possible usages of madda but they only speak about maddas on alif.

The madda is there to indicate the long vowel. In tajweed, there are different maddas that indicate different vowel lengths. =)

Babelfish wrote:I know the word مِئَة can also be writtenمِائَة, so there are probably other such exceptions, especially in Qur'aanic Arabic.

Actually, the مئة/مائة thing has nothing to do with vowels. Arabic didn't always have all those dots and hamzas and stuff. They were added to stop some confusions regarding mixing up some words with others and to keep the Qur'aan from being misinterpreted. مئة, which is how it's actually spelled, used to be mistaken with منه because they would look exactly the same if you ignore the hamza and the dots. So, to know which is which, مئة was changed to مائة. It was just the orthography that changed, the pronunciation remained the same. And now, though it can still be written in both ways, it's better to use مئة, since the confusion is no longer there.

Babelfish wrote:Wow, I didn't know the Qur'aan had such differences in orthography from Modern Arabic... The dagger alif appears there several times with the fatha above it, final (silent) alif of indefinite objective case not connected to the word (e.g. in نَفْسً ا) :shock:

I hope I understood that correctly.. if I did, then: There is no dagger alif in نفساً and the alif shouldn't be separated from the word. The two dashes above the alif is a diacritic called tanween al fatH. This diacritic is put when the noun is not in the 'mu3arraf' form (not النفس ). So, nafsan. The 'an' is how this tanween is pronounced, and it only comes at the end of an undefined noun. And yeah, the alif here is silent because tanween alfatH necessitates it(orthographic reasons), unless the word ends with ــة , then you can just place it on top of it. For the other two tanweens, no alif is necessary and they are placed on top of the last letter of the word.

Javier wrote:
Babelfish wrote:I'd double-check it all against the printed version though... There's this ﭐلْأَرْضِ near the end with the laam and alif improperly connected - should be الأرض but adding the sukuun on the laam breaks up the لا ligature, which is simply a bug in the Arabic rendering engine afaik. So I suspect there may be others...

Yes, there are some technical problems in rendering the text, specially with the position of the harakat, they overlap each other. When I copied the text I thought the small subscript and superscript letters and the madda on the yeeh were technical faults, after I compared it with my printed edition of the Qur'aan, I was surprised to see that they were also there. :)

I don't see the improper connection. So yeah, it's probably just the rendering.

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Re: Short questions

Postby Bubulus » 2009-04-17, 21:38

I don't see the improper connection. So yeah, it's probably just the rendering.

Yeah, it's the rendering only. I played a bit around with that word and it seems it's only certain fonts that have the bug. The word in Babelfish's post looks fine in both examples in my computer.

He meant ٱلْأَرْض vs. ٱﻟْﺄَرْض .
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Re: Short questions

Postby jaybee » 2009-04-17, 22:00

Those look exactly the same to me.. should I get my eyes checked?
Oh, and remember to put the dot for the ض.

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Re: Short questions

Postby Bubulus » 2009-04-17, 22:16

jaybee wrote:Those look exactly the same to me.. should I get my eyes checked?

Dear Jaybee, you know what? I think it's just these stupid Western computers designed by Microsoft not to render languages from other zones of the world correctly. :cry: :evil:

Image

Yesterday my computer downloaded some upgrades to Microsoft's DEP in the morning. Later on, when I was trying to do some exercises writing Chinese with a natural IME, the DEP didn't let the IME work on anything (be it NotePad, Firefox, whatever), as it considered an aggression from an external program. And the IME is even developed by Microsoft itself! -__- It completely pissed me off. Today it downloaded a correction and it's working fine again. I hate this thing. But sadly, it's the standard...

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Re: Short questions

Postby jaybee » 2009-04-17, 22:47

ok! now I see it! But... it's still okay like that, even if it isn't common.
wow! I pictured something completely different :P

Good luck with the DEP thing. :( It gets really annoying sometimes.

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Re: Short questions

Postby Javier » 2009-04-17, 22:53

Thanks Jaybee for your explanations, very useful :)

@Neqitan: Yup, sometimes computers and their software are not well suited for some uses of some languages like Arabic. But at least nowadays at a basic level is "usable" :) If you knew the ordeals I went through when I was a teenager in order to enable Arabic or Thai in computers... I mean using D.O.S. - but it was fun to make it work :D
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Re: Short questions

Postby Bubulus » 2009-04-17, 23:43

Javier wrote:Thanks Jaybee for your explanations, very useful :)

@Neqitan: Yup, sometimes computers and their software are not well suited for some uses of some languages like Arabic. But at least nowadays at a basic level is "usable" :) If you knew the ordeals I went through when I was a teenager in order to enable Arabic or Thai in computers... I mean using D.O.S. - but it was fun to make it work :D

D.O.S.?!? What's that? I think I've heard some rumours and legends about it! :P Yes, computer rendering of other languages has improved a lot since 2000, when all those beautiful dll's started being packed with the information how to deal with writing scripts. I hope in some coming years they'll finally be debugged, let's just be patient.

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Re: Short questions

Postby Javier » 2009-04-18, 13:15

Neqitan wrote:D.O.S.?!? What's that? I think I've heard some rumours and legends about it! :P

(drums) ta da! Wonder no more, the myth is true :lol: Here you are how DOS 6.0 with Arabic support looks like, I copied a text from Al-Jazeera today and displayed it. I tried with the first Sura, but the codepage of Arabic DOS does not support the harakat, so there were lots of question marks. Believe me, in these days the language support in modern operating systems is much better ;) Not perfect, but for the dinasours like me the actual language-related technology is a dream come true :D
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Re: Short questions

Postby Babelfish » 2009-04-24, 13:27

@jaybee: I guess I've confused you... :wink: What was weird to me inنَفْسً ا was only that the final alif isn't connected to the word, also inجَمِيعً ا in the text that which Javier posted. The dagger alif appeared in other words in the text, e.g.مِن أَجْلِ ذَٰلِكَ where above the dagger alif a fatHa also appears.

Thanks for the explanation about مئة :) It's interesting to me b/c the Hebrew Bible also has similar phenomena. Though some of them are less about orthography changes and more about copying errors which were preserved in the sacred text, I suppose :roll:

@Javier: <Butthead's voice> hehe, hehe, coool </Butthead's voice> :lol:
Actually you can still see such things if you open a DOS console in Windows XP and have files or directories named in foreign languages. Imagine a DOS console with Chinese in the prompt instead of 'My Documents'... Mind-boggling :lol:


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