whats the plot

here’s the second edition of the list. see if you can translate these to english, and look out for the answers to this list and the first edition of the list soon insha’Allah!

• tareeq al bawaba – طريق البوابة
• 3al-lem el dekka – علم الدكة
• bedoon welaya – بدون ولاية
• merta7 3al akher – مرتاح على الأخر
• 3asifat al mokh – عاصفة المخ
• o2af ganb – قف جانب
• no2tet kasr – نقطة كسر
• lematha al nesba al thahabeya – لماذا النسبة الذهبية
• noskha fa7meya 3amya2 – نسخة فحمية عمياء
• nas ba7eb – نص بحب
• elbes sa3b – إلبس صعب
• belyard etisalat – باليرد إتصالات
• al khat al mayet – الخط الميت
• shoghl berwaz – شغل برواز
• seyaset naql al kalam al majnoon – سياسة نقل الكلام المجنون
• el sa3b al sahl – الصعب السهل
• ahlan ya tareeq – أهلاً يا طريق
• wedn al-mu7ar-rik – ودن المحرك
• ton na3na3 we7esh – طن نعنع وحش
• 3ala el debanna – على الذبابة
• etefa2 regala – اتفا رجالا
• anessa wa2fa ta7t – انسة واقفة تحت
• 3amood be 6aboor – عمود بطبور
• innahu thahaba bondo2 – إنه ذهب بندق

over a year ago, my ex-roommate and i published a link, entitled “Lughat ul Arabiyya fi asrina” – today, over a year later, i am happy to announce a new set of words and phrases to add to the given list.  most of these, mind you, have come up in the past 5 weeks in which i’ve been in egypt (i don’t take all the credit – this list was devised by my friends and i).  so without further adieu, here is the list:

• khashabat ul ba2 – خشبة ال-ب
• 7ashara – حشرة
• shafra ta7t al nashra – شفرة تحت النشرة
• ye-akkel wara – يؤكل وراء
• 7awd fawq yawmi – حوض فوق يومي
• zawed 3amood fel tarabayza fe qa3edat al ma3loomat – زود عمود فالتربيزة في قاعدة المعلومات
• shabakat al fool – شبكات الفول
• khusoof – خسوف
• nenafa2laha – ننفألهة
• lam7a mofeeda (sample usage: sebna lel garsone lam7a mofeeda) – or 7arf (sebna lel garsone 7arf) – لمحة مفيدة
• thalj ishta (or, if you’re s3eedi, 3yoon ishta) – ثلج إشطة
• anhu raml (extra credit, anhu raml ghabi – requires a l2 parser) – أنه رمل
• nas al qahwa (sample usage: a7yanan, astakhdem 7asharat al nar fee tha3lab al nar le ajid al 7asharat fe nas al qahwa) – نص القهوة
• fawq al 7ijr – فوق الحجر
• fo2 al tareekh – فوق التاريخ
• ana a7shu (or ana kashkool) – أنا أحشو
• hadhib al khayt (sample usage: matensash te samkar el khayt 3ashan lama teegi tehadhib al khayt fel khayt, maye7salsh mashakel lel khayt) – هذب الخيط
• 3aqeedat ul 7ashasheen – عقيدة الحشاشين
• 7alet al hawa (or shart al hawa) – حالة الهواء
• ijtima3 wenta wa2if fo2 – إجتماع و إنت وإف فوق
• mujamma3 al ma2kolat (or muqri2 al ma2kolat) – مجمع المأكولات
• baskaweet – baskaweet
• toot al aswad – توت الأسود
• sena zar2a – سنة زرقة
• yasooq al barq – يسوق البرق
• 3adee al mina – عادي المينة

stay tuned for part 2!

do you watch anta ambooba in tha3lab al nar? click here for a list of funny, literal arabizations done by my roommate and i.

i always used to get upset when i send a message or set a status on an english site in arabic, only to have the punctuation all messed up. well, thanks to two unicode control characters, \u200e and \u200f (for ltr and rtl, respectively), i can finally go from writing:

يحيى الإسلام!

to writing:

يحيى الإسلام!‏

much better thanks goes to this wikipedia article and adil allawi, whom i first heard about this from.

one of my coworkers sent me this today. pretty funny that they blatantly ripped off the images and such. on a similar note, it seems as though there’s way too much red tape to go through in order to get something like this officially done.

مسلسل قوي بجد و راءع

حال الدنيه يحزن – اءول ايه بس – اللهم احفظنا واحفظ شباب و بنات المسلمين… امين

update – try pasting that into google translate and see what it says… apparently, “ameen” translates to secretary and google doesn’t like egyptian slang…

iconv rocks. so often do i find this command really useful:
iconv -f original_encoding -t utf8 file > utf8_file

i’ve been using vim 7 beta for a while (which, by the way, was just released as vim 7 a day or so ago), but i never really realized how easy they’ve made it to look at arabic text files now (compared to what it used to be… there used to be an intricate setup process and a set of patches to run for vim 6x as documented by nadim on arabeyes. now, all you have to do is :set encoding=utf8 and :set arabic and you’re set.

you can see a screenshot here.

the past 2 days at work, i’ve had some interesting happenings… yesterday, i met my egyptian friend and coworker who works here with me too, and, when he asked how i was doing, i said, “el7asharat wel saraseer metala3een 3aynee” (which roughly means, ‘insects and roaches are giving me a hard time’) — he said, “oh, you’re one of those guys! just like these other guys who are like, ‘senna zar2a’ for bluetooth” :p i practiced it on some germans in broken german too, ‘hast du blau tzan on dein komputer?’ — hehe.

i guess what’s interesting though is that in pretty much all languages, all the technical terms are in english. it sounds really funny to say ‘senna zar2a’ or ‘blau tzan’ for bluetooth and ‘saraseer’ or ’7asharat’ for bugs… why though? hehe i guess in arabic, some people call the internet, ‘alshabaka,’ which literally means ‘the net’ (like a fishing net) — (by the way, why don’t they say ’3esh el3enkaboot’ or something? (spider web)). but yeah, most people call it, “el net” — ‘el’ being the.

as for y3k… so today, i introduced a y3k in the source code to our application. i asked my project lead and such if it was okay, and they said, “no one will be using our software until then.” — basically, i had a list of files, *strTIMESTAMP.ext — and i wanted to delete them all, but i don’t want to delete *str.ext itself — just the ones with a timestamp. so because the delete method doesn’t take in a regex (so i can’t pass in *str+.ext), i had to find another solution.

the easy way (which i didn’t want to do because i am lazy) is just copy *str.ext if it exists to something else, do the delete, and copy it back. but instead, i opted to do delete *str2*, which means in the year 3000, our software will stop deleting its temporary files… i might go back and fix it later after fixing the other important bugs…

update: i found a much easier fix — use *str?*.* instead since ‘?’ is supported

peace…
one interesting observation i came along is the treatment of “ﻻ” (which you get by pressing b on a qwerty keyboard) in php… for whatever reason, if someone enters it into a form for example and you try to get the value of the first character of the string, you get 0. oddly enough, this works fine for any other arabic characters typed in. any ideas on why this would happen?

no one has still fixed the bugzilla bug i reported a while back about arabic shaping… looks like i might have to grit my teeth and do it if i really want it done

لقد عزمت النية ان اتعلم كتابه العربيه على الكمبيوتر إن شاء الله.