It's an approximation of how many Muslims there are in the world, making the generous but not entirely incorrect assumption that they will be familiar enough with Arabic to at least be able to tell if you've completely borked your rendering.

I would be careful linking "Muslims" and "Arabic readers/speakers".

I know Muslims who would be challenged to speak more than 3 words of Arabic, as well as Arabic speakers who are Christians or atheists.

i think every muslim can speaks more than 3 words, every muslim known what al fatiha is. that's 25 words.

I'm completely ignorant of Muslim culture but there was a time where Catholics recited prayers and liturgy in latin and plenty of practitioners recited the sounds without really understanding them.

Source: my grand aunts saying "arapreme" where "ora pro nobis" would go (the former kinda sounds like an Italian word). Also probably related, "hocus pocus" is the "magic" expression "hoc est corpus" ("this is the body [of Christ]").

Learning how to read and pronounce arabic properly is part of the religion. As all prayers etc are in Arabic and you are supposed to recite them in arabic not a translation and wrong pronunciation can change the meaning so they are strict about teaching proper pronunciation. Though I agree with you about the 2 billion number being incorrect but it was being used a turn of phrase not an accurate number.

Not everywhere. I live in an islamic region (around 40%). Religious quotes in every other home, but maybe 2-3% of people know at least some arabic letters, not to mention words. You learn it only if you learn at madrasah or are hardcore muslim (not as in extremism, but as in taking it seriously). After you learn it, you have to listen to popular interpreters, because Quran is still hard to get right on your own.

I grew up in a Muslim environment and I know al fatiha and more. But I don't understand a single word of it or can't tell if what I recited is a word or a whole sentece. I believe 99% of the population in my country are the same. Also we can't read Arabic script.

What country did you grow up in? We all don't speak arabic but can fluently read the script.

Turkey

In my surroundings I would say roughly 90% of people reciting al fatiha do so based on sounds learnt by heart, they would hardly be able to explain the meaning of these individual sounds.

The only assumption is that Muslims may, on average, be able to "read the Arabic alphabet to some degree". Obviously 'some degree' makes it very variable, does not imply being able to really read/write/speak.

I don't know if it's true but that does not seem unreasonable.

> I don't know if it's true

> that does not seem unreasonable.

My point is that what seems reasonable to someone that doesn't know anything about the subject means nothing, and could even end up being somewhat offensive.

Try to reverse the logic and realize how absurd it would look to you: say a guy in middle east wanted to roughly estimate the number of Latin speakers and made the assumption that it should roughly be the same as Catholics.

Wikipedia says there's ~2 billion muslims, and 400 millions Arabic-dialect speakers (native and non native). So on average 20% of muslims are able to understand basic arabic, I expect that not even half of those would be able to read and understand classical Arabic such as written in Quran.

Again, the assumption was not that Muslims are Arabic speakers...

if all catholics were taught the bible in latin, you could make the assumption (true or false but reasonable) that all catholics would be able to read latin to some degree.

Coran is traditionnaly taught in arabic even in non arab countries. Also I have no idea how these country can read or decipher arabic in general, I can guess where these number come from

Funny enough there are many Muslims who can read Arabic but have almost no idea what they are reading as they don't speak it. The Quran is interpreted into many languages but prayer is read in Arabic no matter what their native language is. Reading the Quran is also preferrably done in Arabic, as translation is open to the interpretation of the translator, so the only truly immutable word is read in Arabic.

Interpretation of Arabic itself is the least problem they have. It takes a well-educated interpreter to make correct sense out of most statements.

With few exceptions, Islamic revelations do not state which Quranic verses or hadith have been abrogated, and Muslim exegetes and jurists have disagreed over which and how many hadith and verses of the Quran are recognized as abrogated,[6][7] with estimates varying from less than ten to over 500.[8][9]

> The whole 'two billion people can read the Arabic alphabet to some degree' is a weird claim

Not a weird claim at all. Even without harakat, it is obvious when Arabic script is messed up (via alignment or letter reversal) to anyone who can read the script. It just makes whatever you are reading look janky and unprofessional.

It's weird, because the number is off by an order of magnitude. "If you count all of the varieties of today’s Arabic together, you can safely estimate that there are about 313 million Arabic speakers in the whole world, making it the fifth most-spoken language globally behind Mandarin, Spanish, English and Hindi." [1]

[1] https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/how-many-people-speak-ara...

The writer most likely count the moslem population. Most moslem don't speak arabic but they recite quran (written in arabic) daily. Most of them will notice if a ال written as ل ا

Egypt has ~100 million people, the vast majority of whom are going to be native Arabic speakers. Algeria, Sudan, and Iraq also have ~40 million people each, again, most of whom are native Arabic speakers (of different varieties). Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen are no slouches either. In short 300 million native speakers of various Arabic languages is extremely plausible.

FWIW, the usual estimate for worldwide adherents to Islam is ~1 billion.

FWIW, I am not a muslim nor a native Arabic speaker but I "can read the Arabic alphabet to some degree".

Though if your numbers are correct, 2 billion sounds way too high

PEW Research and Wikipedia estimate are 1.9B.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2011/01/27/the-future-o...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_by_country

Those estimates are not for Arabic readers or speakers. They are for Muslim or Islam.

Arabic is both a (group of) language(s) and an alphabet/script. The page isn't claiming that 2B people speak some dialect of the Arabic language, it is claiming some 2B people have a degree of literacy in the alphabet/script, so a quarter of the world's population will potentially know if you've screwed up your website/app/game/whatever. You don't need to speak Latin to know that "anunmtMh mucjmydDDDDD" is just the result of me mashing random keys on my keyboard, because you can read Latin letters. Likewise no Mongolian speaker would believe "прнтзх йоэЁюи" is proper Russian, even though those two languages are wildly different.

Also I cannot read Arabic and know enough to see that something is wrong if it's LTR.

Now I know:

> 3. In general, the letter combination ال should be common. The combination ل ا cannot occur in Arabic script, as those characters should be connected.

I still cannot read a jot of Arabic and know enough to identify some cases where the dev/writer has gotten it wrong.

Most Muslims are taught how to read Arabic script, even if they can't understand or speak Arabic. That is because reading the Qur'an in its Arabic form, even without understanding, is a sacred act above reading the translation. Additionally, ritual prayers require reciting verses in Arabic, (again without necessarily understanding). Therefore it's not weird to assume the number of people familiar with Arabic script include the population of non-Arabic speaking Muslims.

This may be referring to people who can "read" the Koran, where "read" means say the text out loud. Understanding what they're saying is a different question, and most of those people probably do not understand the Koran's language (which is a more than thousand year old version of Arabic).

Alternatively, it may be referring to people who read a language written in Arabic script, but not necessarily the Arabic language. Languages that use some variety of Arabic script include Persian (Farsi and Dari), Urdu, Pashto, Western Punjabi, Uyghur and some other languages. Some of those languages use vowel diacritics, particularly Uyghur.

>most of those people probably do not understand the Koran's language (which is a more than thousand year old version of Arabic).

My understanding, as a non-Muslim who doesn't speak Arabic, is that the standard Arabic is pretty conservative such that MSA, as would be commonly heard on TV or read in the news or other more formal settings, is not very far off the Arabic used in the Quran. So I think most native Arabic speakers would understand the Quran well, but may not be able to fluently speak or write it.

And that many Arabic learners learn MSA along with a dialect, so many second language speakers would probably be able to productively read the Quran as well.

Most native Arabic speakers will be able to understand large chunks of the Qur'an. There are some words / phrases in the Qur'an that wouldn't be used in modern Arabic that might prove challenging for those who don't engage with the Qur'an on a regular basis, but the Arabic of the Qur'an is very close to that of MSA.

To most Arab speakers, both Classical Arabic and MSA are simply referred to as Fusha.

There are also many non-speakers of Arabic who understand many verses and can pick up on the gist of many verses in the Qur'an.

MSA is Modern Standard Arabic to save others a google!

I don't understand much Arabic, but I know the alphabet almost as well as the Latin alphabet. If you see something in Latin along the lines of "svciwbc oaoøoaaö", and claims to be Gaelic or whatever, you'll know that something is off - the consonants and vowels just don't work that way.

It won't fool the people who can speak the language, but I think the website is just designed to educate people so that it doesn't look like complete nonsense.

Facebook is surprisingly an offender here. It's common to mix both Arabic and Latin, say, begin with بسم الله and then write the text, sometimes in english, and it'll throw off the alignment of the text completely. You get the Latin words right aligned or the Arabic one left aligned.

Edit: I'm actually quite surprised how well HN handles this.

HN - thankfully - sends text (mostly) unmolested to browsers which generally tend to handle arabic substrings correctly (assuming the page encoding supports it).

HN /could/ make it better by setting css auto directionality for all <p>s, but that would be antithetical to its goals as a English-written forum.

>'two billion people can read the Arabic alphabet to some degree' is a weird claim.

Not really, because

>there aren't two billion people with functional Arabic literacy.

isn’t something that the author claimed. “To some degree” is a phrase that explicitly states that the author isn’t talking about full functional literacy.

It would be a super weird claim if “some degree” and “full functional literacy” meant the same thing, but they don’t! You would almost have to intentionally ignore the meaning of the words the author used and invent a nonexistent overlap of meaning to become confused on this point!

Exactly. That would be just a subtle exaggeration based on a pseudo-claim, to some degree.

> It would be a super weird claim if “some degree” and “full functional literacy” meant the same thing, but they don’t!

They should at least be close if the author isn't trying to pump up the numbers in a misleading way. I definitely assumed that number would be close to the literate number, and not including people who can recognize a tiny fraction. Hell, I can read Arabic "to some degree" if we're being completely literal, but I think including me in a persuasive claim about people that use Arabic would not be appropriate at all.

> You would almost have to

No need to be rude.

>They should at least be close if the author isn't trying to pump up the numbers in a misleading way.

I’m genuinely confused here. The author was pretty much crystal clear about how he defined the size of the group that he was talking about, I do not understand how a person could be confused let alone feel the need to accuse him of being intentionally misleading.

What exactly is the nefarious goal that the author was trying to sneak past you with his clever trick of speaking in plain english?

Suppose I said, "It's important to protect endangered species. There are 130 billion mammals on Earth."

It's plain English, but I picked the wrong measure to support my claim.

Your analogy is backwards. It’s more like the author said “This is good for all mammals” and you are the one that inserted “but there exists a smaller subset of mammals”, which is entirely orthogonal to the point.

The author's thesis is that Arabic text is important because two billion people recognize its alphabet. This fact is irrelevant because it's a proper superset of the group that matters: people who can read Arabic.

Let me try a different analogy. "It's important for caterers in the US to provide a gluten-free meal choice. After all, the population is 332 million!" Without knowing the incidence of gluten sensitivity, it's a borderline-misleading statistic.

I am glad that we agree that this article that referred to people with varying degrees of knowledge of Arabic script is not, in fact, about people that are fluent.

I also agree that the existence of a subset that wasn’t referred to at all in the article is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand!

The article strongly implies that the "some degree" group is the group that matters. But it's not. The group that matters is somewhere in between "some degree" and "fluent".

And the parent comment was not talking about fluent people when writing "can read".

Literally what do you think the words “some degree” mean to you personally?

Posters have been able to pinpoint the number of fluent speakers, can you give me a ballpark to how many people matter and how many don’t matter?

This article about rendering text appropriately has taken such a fun turn into sorting folks into groups that “matter” and “don’t matter”?

If being rigid about these numbers is so important, how many people that don’t matter today might matter next year? How many people are learning arabic script? How many might want to look up something written in arabic without it being rendered in absolute nonsense?

> Literally what do you think the words “some degree” mean to you personally?

I answered that in my first post! I can read a tiny tiny bit of Arabic. That puts me into the literal "some degree" group, but I am also definitely in the not-mattering group, because rendering mistakes with Arabic will not cause me any problems with reading.

> Posters have been able to pinpoint the number of fluent speakers, can you give me a ballpark to how many people matter and how many don’t matter?

Have they? But I don't have numbers, I'm just saying that "fluent" is too small and "some degree" is too big.

> This article about rendering text appropriately has taken such a fun turn into sorting folks into groups that “matter” and “don’t matter”?

Are you offended that I classify myself as not mattering in this very specific context? You don't have to make it sound like I'm saying people don't matter in general, jeez.

> If being rigid about these numbers is so important

If a number is worth busting out to make a point, it's worth being correct.

> how many people that don’t matter today might matter next year? How many people are learning arabic script?

What's your point? If the number changes, then use the new number. Don't use a wrong number because it might change later. Or if you have an expected future number, label it as such.

> How many might want to look up something written in arabic without it being rendered in absolute nonsense?

A lot of those people aren't even inside the "some degree" group, so now you're making a different argument. I'd rather not start any new tangents at this point, if you don't mind.

> What's your point?

My point is that you’re trying to use some sort of odd pedantic mark trick to shift the conversation from your experience of “There is a group that I personally don’t care about” to “Math dictates that this is not actually a problem worth addressing.”

Your position that the important takeaway here is actually the importance of scrutinizing pointless minutiae rather than text rendering being fundamentally broken isn’t empirically based. Your entire argument is “look at how clever I am!”, which is fundamentally off-topic when talking about rendering text properly.

Like lol, how are people supposed to learn the script if their examples are all messed up? As a maths genious surely you could see the issue with how “impacted people” is somewhere between “fluent people” and “fluent people plus an unknown number of others.” What hard number did you land at when adding unknown variable x to the number of fluent speakers you googled?

> Your entire argument is “look at how clever I am!”, which is fundamentally off-topic when talking about rendering text properly.

I think this is a really uncharitable read of this conversation. This thread has been about the veracity and the relevance of the author's claim that "two billion people can read Arabic to some degree".

I don't think anyone is trying to refute the author's conclusion that Arabic text rendering is important. I also don't think anyone is trying to show off how clever they are.

Personally, I agree with the author's conclusion, and I thought the post was really neat! But I also think the 2 billion statistic weakened their argument -- it's better to omit a statistic than include the wrong one.

> This thread has been about the veracity and the relevance of the author's claim that "two billion people can read Arabic to some degree".

This is not really true. You tried to center your conclusion that your math was better than the author’s math while distracting from the topic of rendering text properly.

This thread has been about you insisting that people listen to your math and not discuss rendering text properly. lol this thread has been about how clever you are, _not_ rendering text properly.

It's not about the math at all, just "this seems like the wrong group to use as an example". It's a simple point, nobody is trying to show off.

And in these comments I'm assuming that the author has exactly the right number for the group they cited. Because it's really not about math. I have done no calculations and trust the number given. I just think they're citing the wrong statistic. That's why I'm also uninterested in the factors you mentioned that might influence the number up or down. The actual number doesn't matter for this criticism: even if the number in the article happens to match the right statistic, they're still citing the wrong statistic.

There is a difference between literacy and fluency.

Literacy is ability to understand a writing system. I am literate in the Latin alphabet.

Fluency is ability to understand a language. I am fluent in English.

Neither implies the other. You can be fluent but illiterate (the default until modern universal education), and literate but not fluent (I am literate in the Latin alphabet but I am not fluent in Italian).

The claim that there's ~2 billion people who are literate in Arabic script and will laugh at you if you get it wrong, is more or less true. It's of course referring to the large number of people who can read from the Quran in Arabic but without understanding all the words.

2B still seems like a stretch. Can 2B people read (even with low comprehension) a basic paragraph in Arabic? My SWAG would be 1B people.

If it's Quranic Arabic then the orthography includes vowel markings so vocalising it is considerably easier.

The number of people who can vocalise Arabic without the vowel marks (e.g. a newspaper) is considerably less. But you don't need to be able to do that to notice any of the errors in the article.

A quick Google search seems to indicate that there are 1.9 billion Muslims in the world. It makes sense to assume they know enough Arabic to recgonise at the very least common religious set-phrases like the Bismillah or the Shahada. In my book this counts as "some degree of Arabic script literacy"

You'd have to exclude everybody under 7 or so, everybody who is illiterate (in this very expansive sense), and those that are Muslim but do not read Arabic and do everything in translation.

That might be a small group though and probably outweighed by all the non-Muslim Arabic readers (for instance I work with 2 Egyptians, one is Coptic and one is ex-Muslim and both can easily read Arabic).

> pump up the numbers in a misleading way

Is it misleading? You don't have to be anything like fluent to realise when text rendering is broken. The quantity that is actually relevant to the discussion is the number of people who, when they look at your UI, will know that the arabic text rendering is broken; not the number of people who are fluent in arabic.

The only reason for me to care that it's broken is on behalf of the people that can read it.

So even though I know a single digit number of words, and you can count me in that two billion, nobody should care about getting it right on my behalf.

>The only reason for me to care that it's broken is on behalf of the people that can read it.

The people who can't read it, but who can see that it's broken, will form a lower opinion of your product. It's as if I went to a Polish website and the text was all right-aligned and in all caps. I can't read Polish at all, but I'd still form an opinion about the quality of the site.

I'm not sure if you were trying to disagree with me, but I agree. They will form a lower opinion, but they form that opinion almost entirely because of the people that actually should be able to read it.

If you screw up a language that has 0 readers, it matters far less.

The point of saying how many speakers there are was to increase the strength of that effect. Because of that, it's misleading if you pump up the number. For pumping it up to not matter, the number would have to not matter, and there wouldn't have been a reason to mention it in the first place.

This doesn't make any sense. Why would you want the meaning of "some degree of knowledge" and "full functional literacy" to be close? What's misleading about describing exactly what you're talking about? Who cares how many people are literate in Arabic in this context? What you care about is how many people know enough about Arabic to know that you don't know anything about Arabic.

You seem to be demanding that "people who know enough medical terminology and/or Latin to see through your fictional doctor" be nearly the same class as "people who are doctors," and what's more, implying that's some sort of deception.

> No need to be rude.

Yeah, I think we're talking here about the number of people who will know you messed up rather than the number of people who can actually read the text in your app.

> You could have script that is justified right-to-left and with letters correctly connected and it still be gibberish.

That just simply means you can't read arabic. You absolutely do not need to vowels to be able to read arabic, if you know the language, you know the vocabulary and know how a word should be pronounced. The vowels are there to aid in clarity. In most cases one single vowel could outright turn a word into its own antonym. And right now, 99% of arabic text is written without vowels apart from Quran and literary works.

So, there are degrees of literacy involved, and what we're talking about here is one step up from the bottom layer, a recognition of the writing system, not of a specific language.

I can muddle along somewhat in French, especially written French, but I have essentially no Polish despite working with more Polish people than French. Nevertheless, Polish is written in a Latin script (for about a thousand years) and so I "can read Polish to some degree". If you show me a Polish street address, and then some street signs, I can spot when the sign matches the address, because I understand that symbols which are slightly different just mean the same thing. If you give me Polish mirror writing, I know it's wrong - it's backwards, even though I don't understand it.

If I attempt this in China it won't work, because I don't understand the Han script, so I am not sure whether a symbol I'm seeing is the same symbol written more or less ornately or an entirely different symbol which just looks somewhat similar. Are the symbols backwards? Or maybe they're different symbols which just look backwards.

The layer beneath this by the way is recognition that intent exists. If you show me Chinese text I not only can't read it I'm not sure which symbols are "the same" and which are not, however I can immediately tell this is writing. The writer intended to convey meaning with these shapes, perhaps I can find somebody else to translate them for me. Whereas say, the pattern on my duvet is just a pretty pattern, it doesn't mean anything (yes, I have thought about this, no it isn't a secret messsage) and so I can't get that "translated".

> nevertheless, Polish is written in a Latin script (for about a thousand years) and so I "can read Polish to some degree"

No, reading and being able to decipher script is different. I can read portuguese, spanish or italian (even romanian) to some degree because the languages are close enough to each other but I can't read polish, basque, finish or magyar despite them using the same latin script

> If I attempt this in China it won't work, because I don't understand the Han script, so I am not sure whether a symbol I'm seeing is the same symbol written more or less ornately or an entirely different symbol which just looks somewhat similar.

Just for fun:

Same symbol: 龙 龍

Completely different: 已 己

Let's assume there's a correct "brand" for Coca Cola in Arabic (I have no idea if there is, but I'm sure there's some large brand that was localized) - there will certainly be a very large number of people who recognize that brand name, even if they cannot read, and will recognize it if you break it, just like someone with no literacy at all can recognize something is broke if they see a coke can labelled LOCA CACO.