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- These are characters of the Arabic abjad: أبجدية عربية. If instead, you see a bunch of little boxes or question marks, then you need to install fonts with the appropriate characters
These are characters which appear in related languages:
Text bidirectionality
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1. Left-to-right (incorrect);
2. Right-to-left but not joined (incorrect);
3. Right-to-left and joined (correct).
The biggest problem for incorporating Arabic language text into the English language Wikipedia is that Arabic flows right-to-left while English and other languages written in Latin script flow left-to-right. Worse, the numerals shared by the two languages don't have as strong directionality as the letters, sometimes causing seemingly inexplicable glitches. (See Help:Hebrew for an example in Hebrew script.) This can be fixed by using the template {{lang}} (click on it to learn how to use it) or by the Unicode left-to-right mark (LRM) U+200E at the end of the Arabic text to signal that the following English text should be read left to right. The LRM can be placed using an HTML character identity of either the hexadecimal or decimal value: ‎ or ‎ or ‎. In some cases, it might be possible to just rephrase or move the text around so that the more strongly directed text follows the Arabic text. This avoids the need of the LRM altogether. Arabic script can be incorrectly rendered on a system not supporting Arabic.
Transliteration
editOne suggestion is to give the word written in Arabic the first time it appears in an article, followed immediately by one romanization, then using that romanization consistently through the rest of the article.
DIN 31635 standard is one of the widely used schemes, with one sign for each Arabic letter.
Another transliteration standard is ALA-LC, which uses fewer additional diacriticized letters but adds more digraphs.
Arabic chat alphabet should be avoided.
Unless the article or section is about a local dialect or names, the pausal (without case endings إﻋﺮاب ʾiʿrab) pronunciation of the literary Arabic (الفصحى al-fuṣḥā) is preferred. Usually, the literary Arabic pronunciation is preferred when the article deals with something related to Islam. See Arabic and Islam.
The case ending may be appropriate when a name uses ʾIḍāfah إضافة (here: possession). Whenever ʾiʿrāb is used, make sure that you drop superfluous auxiliary constructions such as a in the article (a)l-, e.g. عيد الفطر ʿīd al-fiṭr or ʿīdu l-fiṭr.
E.g. Egypt مصر:
- Miṣr: Modern Standard Arabic/Classical Arabic, pause (الوقف al-waqf); preferred
- Miṣru: Modern Standard Arabic/Classical Arabic, nominative case, avoided.
- Maṣr: Egyptian Arabic; it is not preferred to transliterate dialects in Arabic romanization, because they were only designed for literary Arabic pronunciation.
- In this case of Egyptian Arabic, use {{IPA|arz|mɑsˤɾ}} and transcribe in IPA.
See also
editFonts
editExternal links
edit- Google Ta3reeb—Arabic Keyboard using English Characters
- Yamli Editor—For writing in Arabic without an Arabic Keyboard (with automatic conversions and dictionary)
- Bidirectional text
- Arabic support on MS Windows Vista
- Urdu rendering support and fonts