(no subject)

[camwyn]

Working from home today. no relation to either personal COVID exposure or office preparation procedures. No, I'm waiting for the plumber, who said he'd be here 'Friday morning'.

OTOH we have users testing the hardware necessary to make two weeks of working from home viable, or at least one user testing today and others taking the hardware home with them, so there's that.

Keeping an eye on the weather meanwhile to see if flight school's gonna happen tomorrow. I'm still coughing but not having the dangerous fits, so right now my big issue is the strong possibility of 15-16 mph winds with 25 mph gusts. I haven't flown in weeks and it is getting to me. Studying for the written exam is not the same at ALL. Being in the cockpit has WAY less chance of causing me to yell "AND THAT'S WHAT HAPPENED TO KOBE BRYANT'S PILOT!" if I get a question about visibility, flight conditions, cloud separation distance, scud running, warning systems, aircraft performance limitations, airspace restrictions, the Los Angeles airport area- seriously, there's a question on the written exam that deals with the licensing needed to fly out of a specific small airport within sneezing distance of LAX- or poor aeronautical decision making.

Wholly unrelated, my Instagram feed is driving me crazy. I have around 350-375 followers, most of whom I followed back. A not insignificant number of them are jewelry makers in the Middle East, or are Middle Eastern jewelry makers/sellers based elsewhere who cater to the same general ethnic audience. A good number of them are Iranian, either by current location or by point of origin. This is not in itself a problem, but what is driving me crazy is that the entirety of my foreign language education has been Italian (home classes, high school), Spanish (Sesame Street), French (5th grade homeroom teacher, the vocabulary necessary for cooking classes), Mandarin (a few classes), Ancient Greek (college courses), and Russian (not so much the language as the alphabet, which I taught myself largely out of spite after my senior year theology teacher said she'd be collecting our notebooks periodically to verify that we were taking notes; how was I supposed to know she could read the Cyrillic alphabet?). There is a woman in my office who has reasonable familiarity with Arabic, as she was born in Cairo and the family moved to America when she was still young, but she only has basic familiarity rather than reading fluency. She's offered to take written Arabic to her mother for translation if I need it, which I am grateful for, but what's driving me buggy is the fact that I can't tell written Arabic and written Farsi apart, and I don't want to put something in front of Julie and ask for her mother's help only to be told 'yeah, Mom says she doesn't speak Farsi'.

(I know Instagram has a 'show translation' feature. This does not help if the accounts post an image that has written words as part of the image rather than as a separate caption.)

Wonder how useful Duolingo is in learning either Farsi or Arabic. Esp. given that Julie indicated Arabic's dialect differentiation is on par with asking somebody from, like, Firenze to translate written Calabrese or Neapolitan dialect.

Comments

[genarti]

There's an easy way to tell Farsi and Arabic apart based on just learning the alphabet somewhat, and that's that Farsi has a handful of letters that Arabic doesn't. It's a bit like identifying French based on the fact that there are é and ç in the words. It won't be 100% foolproof -- a given text might not happen to contain any of those letters, especially if it's short -- but it's a good rule of thumb for an initial sort. If something contains چ (which will also show up without that bottom hook, but anything with three dots underneath it is an instant giveaway) or گ (note the line over top of it) or ends with a letter that looks like ک (Arabic has that letter, but uses a different shape of it at the end of a word), you know it's not Arabic.

Note that Urdu also uses the Persian alphabet. In looking at the sample Urdu text on wikipedia, and the poetry samples just above, what strikes me is all those little backward hooks at the ends of words, which I've never seen in any Arabic word. (It looks like it's a modified ی, maybe?) But that might just be a font choice thing. Anyway, it sounds like you run into Urdu less often.

(You could also run it by me if you want, as triage before passing it on to a coworker's mom. I've forgotten a whole lot of my college Arabic over the years, and my dialect knowledge was never great, but unless we're talking about one or two words, "does this look like it's got generally Arabic patterns and the usual standard prepositions" should still be well within my grasp.)

Alas, I'm no help on Duolingo advice; I've used it to practice a language I learned previously a few times, but it super doesn't work for me as a language learning method. I know it has Arabic, at any rate. There are also a bunch of learn-the-Arabic-alphabet apps, which I know because I found a lot of them when I tried and failed to find a more intermediate app for (re)learning the language.

[camwyn]

I have a handful of Instagram accounts that I follow or that follow me which are in Urdu-speaking areas, but they're mostly gemstone dealers, since a lot of gemstone rough is either sold out of Pakistan or sent to Pakistan for cutting and polishing. They generally use English in their listings, though, so the question of Urdu hasn't come up.

I may wind up passing a few things to you for recognition. There's one seller who I'm almost positive is using Arabic rather than Farsi, as they're based in Dearborn, MI, and I think the big immigrant population there is Arabic-speaking more than Farsi-speaking. I'm not entirely sure, though. That one makes jewelry using one of the alphabets, the way you see English-speakers wearing their initials or 'Love' or whatever as a pendant, which is why I can't use 'show translation'.

[genarti]

Feel free! Honestly, it'll be good practice for me; I've been wanting and intending to pick Arabic back up, but so far I've only done a couple evenings of very desultory review. Anything to provide more impetus and practice is handy.

My vague impression of that area is similarly that there's a big Arabic-speaking population there, but I have no idea if there's also a significant Farsi-speaking population or not. Anyway, those pendants sound very pretty! As well as impossible to run through free internet translation, indeed. And different scripts make it a lot harder to type something up to google or run through a dictionary, unless you already have some knowledge of it. I've run into that a few times with idle curiosity about something in one of the Indian subcontinent scripts, or Chinese (which in recent years a bit of Japanese study has given me a little more of a toehold into, but no toehold into good dictionary resources) or whatever.

[dogstar]

My new place is near a tiny airfield that's got at least one helicopter instructor flying out of it - spent about 30 minutes yesterday waiting for a call and watching someone repeatedly landing and taking off over and over again and thought of you :P