Re: questions on the wordlist

[sven vahar <aabram at gmail dot com>]

On 4/19/05, Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com> wrote:

> We couldn't find a proper wordlist to start with and had
> to generate our own (all within the scope of an open license).

I already compared these two wordlists (the Arabeyes one and the
English-Estonian wordlist provided by the Institute of the Estonian
Language) and got 35455 initial matches based on identical (case
ignored) English words in both lists. Not too shabby for a start.

> I'm unaware of what they use in the Al-Mawrid so if there
> is URL that can shed some light that would be wonderful.

For online lookups I use Sakhr dictionary at
http://dictionary.sakhr.com/. For example the lookup for "mountain" 
and "sea" give Arabic nouns without an article. As a learner I find it
easier because I may not know whether the Arabic word given actually
starts with "al" or is it just an article. For example ‏الحيمياء of
which I cannot know whether the "al-" belongs to the word and is a
part of it is it used as an article and the real word would be. This
especially confusing when respective English word starts also with an
"al", like in this example "alchemy". Maybe the difference for me is
that I'm not viewing the wordlist as... well... the wordlist for
native users but rather than the dictionary. I acknowledge that these
are different approaches. For example a dictionary-suitable list would
ideally include vowel diacritics as well ;-)

Anyway, when I create a decent Estonian-Arabic dictionary/wordlist
based on Arabeyes wordlist I'll let you know.