questions on the wordlist

[sven vahar <aabram at gmail dot com>]

Hi,

I've been considering taking the Arabeyes wordlist as a basis for an
Estonian-Arabic wordlist. I'm currently maintaining  an online
English-Estonian dictionary (http://www.tps.edu.ee/nastik/) and since
I've started studying Arabic (I'm just a beginner) I've been looking
for free Arabic wordlist for (semi-)automatic conversion. My goal is
to build at least rudimentary Arabic-Estonian dictionary. Arabeyes
wordlist seemed almost perfect at first but I've stumbled upon few
issues that I'd like to ask clarification about.

All English words have initial capital letter. Why this decision? The
problem with this is that one cannot distinguish between proper names
and similarily written regular words. For example - in English "Jenny"
is a name while "jenny" is a female donkey. "John" is a name but
"john" is a loo. While I can see that in Arabeyes wordlist both Jenny
and John give just Arabic tansliteration of those names I wouldn't
know this for other words. There are many other such words, for
example Maxim: it could be the name, it could be an aphorism or it
could be a machine gun. That's the reason why dictionaries use
lowercase for regular words and initial capital letter for proper
names. Is there an Arabeyes wordlist available which follows this
fashion?

Second problem is that as a learner I find it confusing that most
(all?) nouns are given with the definite article instead of just the
base form. البحر (al bahr) instead of just بحر (bahr), البيت instead
of just بيت (I hope I get right characters here). It is confusing for
the beginner and a foreigner. For non-native speaker it is easier to
look up the base word and add the article if needed, rather than look
up the word with an article and then deduct to get the base form. I
find using my small Al-Mawrid (2004, 6th ed) dictionary easier than
the wordlist. What was the reasoning to include the articles with the
words in Arabeyes wordlist?