Hi Zdeněk, Kudos! You figured one out correctly, and got only close on the second one because I gave you the wrong clue! Sorry. The two word-separated parsings of the second text are: جمالو ہار گیا۔ جما لوہار گیا۔ meaning: " Jamaloo was defeated" and "The ironsmith Jumma has left". While we are on fun and games, it's worth mentioning an embarrassment related to the same Nastaleeq ambiguity that a Pakistani TV channel suffered recently. An announcer pronounced the Urdu transliteration of the English phrase "motor vehicle" as "MoTroo Haikal", most likely thinking of it as a proper noun.
Kamal Abdali On Fri, Feb 19, 2016 at 5:18 AM, Zdenek Wagner <zdenek.wag...@gmail.com> wrote: > 2016-02-19 4:25 GMT+01:00 Kamal Abdali <k.abd...@acm.org>: > >> >> On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 7:38 PM, Zdenek Wagner <zdenek.wag...@gmail.com> >> wrote: >> >>> I have compared both and personally I like Jonathan's version. Of >>> course, I am not an expert. I do not have any collection of high quality >>> Urdu documents. I have only seen Mirza Ghalib's manuscript in his museum in >>> New Delhi and some Urdu documents in the museum in LaL Qila. My knowledge >>> of Urdu is very weak. Spoken Urdu is basically the same language as Hindi >>> so that I can listen to BBC Urdu and understand almost everything but >>> reading is difficult for me and I know nothing about calligraphy. It will >>> take me hours to read the sample text, I can only recognize from the title >>> that it is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Anyway, the larger >>> interword spaces do not help me toread the text. >>> >>> As an example I am attaching the text from the Jama Masjid in New Delhi. >>> Look at the beginning of the first line. There is a considerable space >>> between آ and پ although آپ is a single word. The interword space between >>> آپ and جامع is smalle that the space in the middle of جامع and there is >>> almost no space between جامع and مسجد. There is no space between پر and >>> زیارت but I still can see the words. In the third line the largest space is >>> in the middle of پرکشش. Of course, it helped me to see the same text in >>> Devanagari, I would probably be unable to read the Urdu text without it. >> >> >> >> Zdeněk, >> >> If each word in Urdu (or in any language written using Arabic characters) >> formed a connected figure, then any amount of interword space (including >> zero) would be OK. But since some letters connect with the next letter and >> some do not, words often consist of two or more separate figures. Having >> interword spaces then helps to delimit each word. Stringing words together >> without any space between them is an incessant source of ambiguities and >> problems. That's why all scripts for the Arabic alphabet other than >> Nastaleeq now use interword spaces. This forum is not a place to go into >> more details, so I'll just give you two examples in the form of >> entertaining puzzles. Without interword spaces, you can read a certain Urdu >> text (word string) as: >> >> EITHER "He is eighty-four years old." >> OR "That thief is eighty years old." >> >> Another one can be read >> >> EITHER "Jamaloo was defeated." >> OR "Jumma went to Lahore." >> >> (Jamaloo and Jumma are both common nicknames.) New learners are >> constantly frustrated because the printed shapes in front of them provide >> no visual help in separating the words. Basically, the script assumes that >> you already know what you're trying to learn by reading! >> >> Again, I am not calling for a ban on tight kerning, but I am asking >> Jonathan to be flexible about interword spaces for anyone who wants it. At >> present most Urdu word processors make it very difficult to overcome >> interword space suppression in Nastaleeq fonts. >> >> Kamal Abdali >> > > Hi Kamal, > > thank you for examples, I see the problem of چوراسی and چور اسی without > and with the interword space. The spaces will be needed especially in > textbooks of Urdu and in dictionaries. > > Could you, please, send me the second example in Urdu? It is interesting > to me. I can guess that the second sentece ends with حلاحور گیا and by > similarity with Hindi I could imagine verb حارنا but then the first > sentence would end with حار گیا > The ending is thus different (حار versus حور) but as I wrote, I may be > mistaken. > > I hope the first example in full is: > وہ چوراسی سال کا ہے، > وہ چور اسی سال کا ہے۔ > > Zdeněk Wagner > http://ttsm.icpf.cas.cz/team/wagner.shtml > http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz > > > >> >> >> >> >> -------------------------------------------------- >> Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: >> http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex >> >> > > > > -------------------------------------------------- > Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: > http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex > >
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