Re: Arabization^H^H^H^H

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

Exceptional report (as usual :-)  You really have a way of telling a story,
that's for sure :-)

--- Mostafa Hussein <mostafa at linux-egypt dot org> wrote:
> Mohammed Sameer, Alaa Abdel Fatah and I went to the Ain Shams University

Ah, the ".eg dream team" :-)

> I finished
> preparing my slides at 4:00am the same day, woke up at 6:30am. Alaa
> didn't sleep from the day before. So both of us were two cold and
> constantly yawning beings.

There is something about linux which makes you simply forget sleep :-)

> Anyways, after the acedemic babel about how they are using statistical
> spam-filtering-like tools and a couple of other hyper complicated
> routines for speech recognition.

Actually the 'speech recognition' part seems like something we need to
look into a bit.  There is another project that might be of interest to
them (and us) -- the MBrola project,

  http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola.html

Do please follow-up with them to see what they think and how they could
help there.

> Oh, after the academic babel about how they are using blah and blah.
> Prof. Mohamed Yoness started his part (which is a superset of ours). Two
> Arabic researches discussed how Arabic is in need to be revived to the
> levels of the pre-islamic times. And that no matter what, computers will
> always fail infront the greatness of the arabic language. They went on
> discribing how untrained translation of any text is incest. That arabic
> is an untouchable language that should be cryogenically stored
> indefinitley and only tampered with by super humans (read them).

Heheheheeh - did I say 'exceptional summary' yet :-)

Well, there are those that believe things are holy and we should simply
sit and admire 'em and there are those that up-keep the beauty and grandeur
by making sure Arabic is adopted and is propelled into the future.

> Anyways, my part came to demonstrate `Open Source Arabization Efforts'.
> Did I say that I was criticized before I start. One of the arabic super
> humans noted my presentation headline on the projector screen several
> minutes before I start. Mentioning that it is a racial thing to say
> Arabization and it should be Arabicization! Stating that Arabizition is
> related to Arabs and Arabicization is more related to arabic.

When we first started Arabeyes, I contacted a number of professors the
world over in hopes of their interest and help (Ain Shams was contacted
as well).  Would it be worth while for me to re-dig their names so you
guys can follow-up with them (they were mostly CS professors) ?

> Oh, did I say
> that they criticized the name Arabeyes too. Ofcourse some questions were
> OK. We finally demonstarted Arabbix and distributed 11 CDs, including my
> own CD :..(

Heheheh - tough crowd indeed :-)  But with those 11 CDs gone, I have a
feeling "the dream team" did a wonderful job.  Keep at it !!

> At the end we urged them repeatedly to help us and/or ask us more
> questions on Arabeyes.org and linux-egypt.org.

I highly recommend you keep up with them (follow-ups, etc), that's one
thing we are missing (among many); true linguist knowledge and some
entity to overlook our work and give us some constructive criticism
is critical for a professional end-result.

Again, many many thanks on the effort, the hard work and sleepless night
(or maybe nightS ;-).  I'm sure this will lead to more awareness and more 
presentations - at the end you guys will be expert public speakers at
a min :-)

Thanks again from Arabeyes and from all its volunteers.

Salam.

 - Nadim


__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search
http://shopping.yahoo.com