> It's a bit like saying "if you have a paragraph in 'English' and it has no e's in it, it's probably not English."

This is true. You should also be able to see the word "the" in several places in English text, and if it is rendered as "ehT" or something like that, the ligature code may have a bug -- similar with reversing the ال (read as "al") pattern.

> I can't read Arabic but I can recognize that pattern. I went to https://www.bbc.com/arabic and could find numerous occurrences.

Really? I only ever learned to read just enough Arabic to read parts of the Quor'an and am by no means fluent, but I couldn't see any mistakes on that website myself.

The comment was that they found numerous cases of ال, not ل ا.

> It's a bit like saying "if you have a paragraph in 'English' and it has no e's in it, it's probably not English."

For the exception, see

see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel)

Wow, having read the example prose, it is quite an interesting sounding book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ella_Minnow_Pea is a riot of a read. Starts with a full complement of letters and drops one letter chapter by chapter.

A group of flying kookaburras flap about a body of liquid. In this group, individuals distinguish from distinct sorts. Small, big, colorful or plain, all flap wings as a way to maintain afloat. It's a sight to watch as this group zips, zooms, and turns all around. It's a natural habitat for this flying squad, and you can find it in many spots around our world. This group adds to our natural world's charm and, through its distinct traits, brings a lot of joy to many.

Great example because if that text is on your corporate website then someone upstream is not doing their job

Edit: obviously it is English but it's definitely not correct for a company website.

Hey, you now want corporate website standard English with no Es? Talk about scope creep!

But it may be totally correct for a website about kookaburras.

There's more than just corporate websites, and frankly, if a company of any meaningful size offers content in Arabic, I'd expect them to hire someone for that. Even part-time or freelance.

> But it may be totally correct for a website about kookaburras.

It isn't; "to maintain afloat" is not grammatical.

You could replace that with "stay afloat" and it would fix the grammatical error without introducing an E.

There's a similar unforced error in referring to a "group" of kookaburras rather than a "flock".

"Individuals distinguish from distinct sorts" is gibberish. I cannot tell what it's supposed to mean.

"All flap wings as a way to [stay] afloat" is, at best, very awkward; fluent English would require "flap their wings", but that would introduce an E.

"Flapping about a body of liquid" is a very odd thing to say unless the body of liquid happens to be suspended in midair, since midair is the only location where you can find birds flapping.

Now, find anothEr 20% of commEnts hErE that follow the samE rulE as yours.

Ah yes, the good old "your heuristic doesn't work on my carefully constructed pathological case" observation, wouldn't be the Internet without that.

GP also said "probably". That's how heuristics work.

You would almost think what you described was our profession :-)

Wait, you get paid for Internet snark?

> your heuristic doesn't work on my carefully constructed pathological case

This is a bit like writing unit tests, debugging code, and so on.

It's a heuristic (claims to be probably helpful). You might as well complain that checking string size first as part of an equality check of strings that demonstrably have a very large distribution of sizes is obviously dumb because obviously you can construct same-length strings at will. Breaking rules of thumb is the easiest thing in the world.

The 'e' is in your username. :)

> In general, the letter combination ال should be common.

It was a really smart way of saying you don't need to know anything at all to pattern match on this a spot a very common problem.

Also, if you haven't checked out the youtube video on that page I highly recommend it. It gives a great concise summary of the issue, and it's impressive how much I was able to learn to visually parse Arabic script with only a couple of mins into the video.

[1] - https://youtu.be/X1ynZm1wI18?t=65

The article even links to a site where you can practice: https://notarabic.com/

Thanks to this training, I can now identify that numerous Arabic strings on that site are backwards. He wasn't joking, IJ is everywhere.