For Pacifica - random quotes on Arabic and Qur'an

Clemens

Aedilis

  • Aedilis

Location:
Maine, United States.
I'm curious to know if صندوق can mean a square on a piece of paper as the word box does in "think outside the box," or does it only mean a literal three-dimensional box?
 

Pacifica

grammaticissima

  • Aedilis

Location:
Belgium
Yes. It shouldn't be so difficult to find out which letter the Arabic version of the name starts with.
 

Clemens

Aedilis

  • Aedilis

Location:
Maine, United States.
Yes. It shouldn't be so difficult to find out which letter the Arabic version of the name starts with.
Sure, but would غranada be as immediately legible to a non-Arabic speaker? Maybe? It reminds of how, in English at least, whenever someone wants to make something look Russian they throw in the letter Я, but as if it were simply a backwards R.
 

Pacifica

grammaticissima

  • Aedilis

Location:
Belgium
It seems to me that غ looks close enough to a g, especially in this context. But I may be biased.
 

Clemens

Aedilis

  • Aedilis

Location:
Maine, United States.
It seems to me that غ looks close enough to a g, especially in this context. But I may be biased.
I might also be biased in that qaf is pronounced like a g in the varieties of spoken Arabic I’m most familiar with.
 

Pacifica

grammaticissima

  • Aedilis

Location:
Belgium
I thought about that as a possible justification, but it still bothers me that it's not the first letter of غرناطة—unless there are variants?
 

Clemens

Aedilis

  • Aedilis

Location:
Maine, United States.
In any case I don’t think the intended audience of the logo is necessarily native speakers of Arabic.
 

Pacifica

grammaticissima

  • Aedilis

Location:
Belgium
It's a pity more dialects aren't available on Wiki so I could check if any uses a qaf in that name. By the way, is there something special about Egyptian Arabic to make it deserve its own Wikipedia when the rest of the Arab world is, it seems, content with the MSA version?
 

Pacifica

grammaticissima

  • Aedilis

Location:
Belgium
Or something special about Egyptians, for that matter (e.g. being more open to linguistic variation, or more nationalistic).
 

Clemens

Aedilis

  • Aedilis

Location:
Maine, United States.
It's a pity more dialects aren't available on Wiki so I could check if any uses a qaf in that name. By the way, is there something special about Egyptian Arabic to make it deserve its own Wikipedia when the rest of the Arab world is, it seems, content with the MSA version?
All I can tell you is that Egyptian Arabic is the American English of the Arab world: everybody is familiar with it and is saturated by its media. There was also historically some promotion of Egyptian Arabic as a form of opposition to the Ottomans and later, European colonial powers. I don't know if this still pertains, and might have been at odds with Nasser's pan-Arabism. I remember one Saudi student who spoke scathingly of any attempt to accord Egyptian Arabic (or any non-Classical Arabic) the status of a proper language. I also remember a Hejazi guy telling how his mother tried modify her speech to sound more Egyptian when talking to anyone who wasn't a native speaker of Arabic, so maybe some people have a perception that it's more comprehensible. To me, Hejazi Arabic already shares a lot of phonetic characteristics with (Cairene) Egyptian Arabic (the pronunciation of qaf not being one of them), but grammatically and lexically I don't think they're particularly alike.
 

interprete

Civis Illustris

  • Civis Illustris

I am in Riyadh right now, it's unbelievable how much it seems to have change. Or how biased
I'm curious to know if صندوق can mean a square on a piece of paper as the word box does in "think outside the box," or does it only mean a literal three-dimensional box?
Interesting! I don’t think صندوق can mean a square on a piece of paper, nor had I ever understood ’think outside the box’ that way :) I always pictured some sort of jack-in-the-box. I’m pretty sure the Arabic borrowing comes from the same misunderstanding, I really doubt it is a proper Arabic idiom...
 

interprete

Civis Illustris

  • Civis Illustris

Or something special about Egyptians, for that matter (e.g. being more open to linguistic variation, or more nationalistic).
Egypt has been home for decades to this atheist/nationalist movement that promotes the use of dialects over MSA, and the status of Egyptian Arabic as the only legitimate official language of Egypt. I believe the Egyptian wiki is largely written by its proponents.
 

Clemens

Aedilis

  • Aedilis

Location:
Maine, United States.
I am in Riyadh right now, it's unbelievable how much it seems to have change.
How long since you had last been there? I had an apartment on Olaya, across from the Aziziya Mall in Muruj, from 2009-2012, which at the time was practically the outer edge of the city. I went back in 2015 briefly and this was definitely no longer the case.
 

interprete

Civis Illustris

  • Civis Illustris

!

How biased what?
Oops I was Riyadh 3 months ago and this was probably a draft of a post I never completed. Didn't notice it was still there when I posted last night. I can't remember what I intended to say :D
 
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