>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.