Blue Chi’s

The new iPhone OS came out a couple of days ago, and for some reason, most people are talking about the really boring copy-and-paste feature which barely anybody ever uses on the go. For me personally the most significant feature of this new OS is the official support for Arabic. Not only can the iPhone now read and write Arabic text, but you can set the whole OS to use Arabic as the system language.

I use the iPhone OS 3.0 on my iPod Touch. The only major difference between the iPhone and the iPod Touch is the iPhone has a sim card and a built-in camera while the iPod Touch does not.

In order to set the system language to Arabic you have to go through Settings>General>International and from there pick Arabic as the language of the system. You can use an Arabic Keyboard without changing the system language by going through Setting>General>Keyboard Layout and check Arabic. That would let you switch the keyboard to Arabic at any time.

Once you set the Language ot Arabic the system will restart into Arabic. All the default applications, except Safari and Mail, use Arabic names:

I don’t have access to a wifi network when I was writing this, so I can’t show you how the browser works in Arabic, but I have a random Arabic email in my inbox from a random stupid girl who spams me with forwards sent to an account I use for sending website newsletters. Anyway, you can see Arabic in mail here:

(Of course I did not forward the stupid message, I’d rather go to hell).

The Arabic keyboard is very similar to the PC layout with some changes in the lower row to fit all the letters:

The coolest thing though, in my opinion, is how the music library uses the Arabic alphabet to sort the music and then follows it with English. I rewrote the name of a single song in Arabic to see how it looks like:

All the song meta data appears in Arabic during playback.

And what’s even cooler is that you can have the lyrics in Arabic as well!! Of course you would have to add these manually one by one. There are programs to do this automatically for English songs, but the program will obviously not work for Arabic songs.

Finally, you can also see Arabic meta data on Cover Flow as well:

The other significant additions in OS 3.0 for me were the landscape mode typing for all applications and spot light search everything. I found the shake to shuffle feature annoying as the songs started shuffling randomly as I walked around with my iPod in my back pocket.

I don’t write much in Arabic, but I would certainly like to read Arabic on the thing even if I don’t necessarily write much. I don’t have many Arabic songs on my iPod, but I would also like to have the meta data for these in Arabic just for the fun of it!

As blasphemous as it might sound, in reality, a great number of people already extensively use English letters to communicate in Arabic through IM, email, SMS, Facebook, twitter, you name it. The voices that do not exist in Arabic such as 3ain and 9ad are replaced by letters and it is almost understood universally now by Arabic speakers that these numbers represent the voices they are meant to replace.

The crazy thing is that this idea was suggested more than 60 years ago by a Lebanese Poet called Saeed Aqil to have Arabic written in the Latin alphabet. Aqil argued that this change would make Arabic accessible to those who can read the letters. Aqil was also in support of having accents such as Lebanese become regarded as independent languages which are taught in the same exact way they are spoken as it made no sense to him to teach classical Arabic that nobody used in real life.

In a similar fashion to Turkish, Aqil created new Latin letters shapes to write down new voices:

The majority of Arabic speakers are Muslims and would reject any suggestion to play around with Arabic as it is hte language in which the Quran would written, but as one article suggests, affecting the script in which the language is written would not necessarily affect the way Quran is actually written. In fact, the purpose of the new language is to make Arabic be read exactly the way it sounds, but with Latin letters. It should also be remembered that Arabic was not written in the same exact way we do now when the prophet Mohammed lived and major new concepts such as tanqeet were only added years after the death of the prophet.

I read an article that was in support of Akil’s Arabic and which claimed that Arabic letters are ugly and unbalanced, unlike the Latin alphabet i which each letter could be contained within a defined box. I don’t agree with that, I think Arabic calligraphy is beautiful, and even if it was harder to decipher due to the transformation of the shape of the letter depending on its location in the word, that adds to the sophistication of the language.

It should be remembered that Aqil’s suggestion was made in an era were Arabic there were great disputes as to how digitalization of the Arabic language could be achieved.

It is funny though that some books were actually printed in the 60s and 70s using Aqil’s Arabic in Latin alphabet. It sounds bizarre, the comparable concept in English would be writing a whole book in TXT speech.

I just thought this topic amusing, especially because in reality many people type all of their Arabic in Latin letters.

I apologize in advance to those subscribed to my blog and who do not understand Arabic. I am very frustrated by what I read on Arabic blogs and I owe the community a post in Arabic. This post is basically about the running case against a moderator of the Omania2.net. I have written about this here and Muscati wrote about it as well.

انا في شدة الاستغراب من المدونين العمانيين وتوقعهم بأن الانترنت هو عالم من الفوضى يحرم فرض الرقابة عليه. انه من الطبيعي ان يتحمل اصحاب المواقع مسؤولية ما ينشر فيها وهذه النظرية لم يتم اختراعها في دول العالم الثالث. في المملكة المتحدة لا تنحصر المسؤولية فقط على صاحب الموقع أو المشرف عليه، بل يمكن تحميل المسؤولية لشركة الاستضافة ومزود الخدمة حتى ولو لم يكونوا هم من قام بكتابة المقال المخالف.

معظم مواقع الأنترنت تدار لاهداف ربحية: سبلة عمان تنشر اعلانات جوجل وقد قامت في السابق بنشر اعلانات بنك مسقط مقابل مبلغ مادي، من الطبيعي ان يتحمل صاحب الموقع مسؤولية ما ينشر في موقعه، فهو يمتلك سيطرة مباشرة على كل موضوع أو رد ينشر، نظام المنتديات المستخدم من قبل المواقع العمانية يحتوي على العديد من خصائص المراقبة ومن الممكن لفريق المشرفين ان يتوثقوا من جميع الردود اذا كانت العملية منظمة، وذلك ما يحصل في الواقع، فمن الصعب على شخص ان ينشر ردا يحتوي على كلمات بذيئة من دون ان يتم حذف رده في خلال ساعات معدودة، إما من خلال اكتشاف المشرف لذلك الرد مباشرة أو من خلال بلاغ قام بارساله احد الأعضاء. الخلاصة أنه من الممكن للمشرفين مراقبة كل موضوع ورد في المنتدى، اذا لم يستطع عمل ذلك فعليه تعيين المزيد من المشرفين.

وجود قانون يحاسب اصحاب المواقع يحمي كل افراد المجتمع وليس فقط كبار المسؤولين في الشركات. تخيل انك فتاة تم التقاط صورتها من دون علمها وتم نشر تلك الصورة في احد المواقع. طبعا من الصعب معرفة الشخص الذي قام بنشر الصورة، وبدلا من ان يحذف المشرف الموضوع فور علمه به يقوم بالتعليق عليه طالبا من باقي الأعضاء “المساعدة” في معرفة شخصية الفتاة. هل هنالك اي شخص لا يعتقد أن صاحب الموقع يجب أن يتحمل المسؤولية في هذا الموقف؟

في رأيي قضية علي الزويدي مطابقة لتلك القصة، كان من الواضح ان الرد المنشور اتهم الوهيبي بالكثير من دون اية ادلة، الزويدي رأى الموضوع وبدلا من ان يحذف ما كان من الواضح اقوال قذف وتشهير، طلب من باقي الأعضاء المساعدة في ترجمة المقالة إلى العربية ليتمكن المزيد من الأعضاء من قراءة الموضوع. الزويدي ايجابياً وافق على نشر الموضوع بعد علمه بمحتواه وفي رأيي يجب ان يتحمل مسؤولية محتوى ذلك الموضوع.

أنا لا أعتقد أن القانون العماني خالي من العيوب، وأعتقد أن قانون الإتصالات سيكون أكثر عدالة إذا وفر لأصحاب المواقع طرقاً لتجنب المسؤولية، إما عن طريق فرض ارسال اخطار من المشتكي لصاحب الموقع لإزالة المحتوى المخالف، كما هو الحال في القانون الأمريكي في مجال مسئولية المخالفات المتعلقة بالحقوق الفكرية، أو من خلال تمكين أصحاب المواقع بإخلاء مسؤليتهم عن طريق اتخاذتهم لخطوات معقولة لتحقق من عدم وجود اية مخالفات – كما هو الحال في قانون التشهير البريطاني.

ولكن في جميع الأحوال من الطبيعي والمفروض ان يتحمل أصحاب المواقع مسؤولية ما ينشر في مواقعهم لحمايتنا نحن كأفراد، فلا يوجد قانون في العالم يسمح لحرية التعبير بأن تتجاوز حقوق وحريات باقي افراد المجتمع.

(Photo credits: Miskan)

I would like to start by saying that I really hate the Omani Internet, I cannot think of a single website to visit when I’m bored and just feel like browsing something weird, funny, or entertaining. If it weren’t for blogs there would be no such thing as Omani internet… well, you can still argue that it does not exist, but that’s beside the point.

I usually look down all Arabic literature because it is irrelevant and out of the touch with the rest of the world. We do not have a literature industry similar to that found in the English speaking world, people generally do not read anything other than newspapers and magazines, and 90% of the books found in the horrible annual book exhibition are religious books.

Recently I discovered a number of Omani Arabic blogs which changed my opinion in Omani Arabic literature, they made me fall in love with Arabic all over again. The content of these blogs is topical and local, yet it is written in awesomely classy Arabic full of figures of speech. I just love their style and how they write in formal Arabic yet integrate local Omani dialect terms to explain a ‘cultural’ concept the same way you would use a French term in an English piece to describe something sophisiticated.

I would like to highlight this article by Blogger Muawiyah describing Omani stereotypes. This post is not comical or even really critical, but merely descriptive of the of the aspirations and beliefs of Omani people. It is a relatively long post, but I really enjoyed it.

Another nice Omani Arabic blog is written by Hamed Al Ghaithi, I loved his post on “Daily Visions” in which he describes several unconnected scenes he was in recently. Most of them are completely random, but yet very personal and vulnerable. It was amazing how the post ended in a new paragraph simply saying “regardless of all the let downs and the failures, life is still fun and delicious” [my emphasis].

I’m so in love with Arabic blogs, I’ve been wanting to start blogging in Arabic for a while. I hate the fact that I am not confident in my Arabic anymore for the lack of practice, it is shameful and stupid. ARABIC IS MY FREAKING FIRST LANGUAGE. Maybe I should start blogging in Arabic to regain my confidence.