From: medawar@prism.poly.edu (Bassem Medawar)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.lebanon
Subject: Re: AlpaLeb V 1.0
Date: 2 Oct 92 17:23:18 GMT
Organization: Polytechnic University, New York

In article <1992Oct1.182810.11452@m.cs.uiuc.edu> soufi@m.cs.uiuc.edu (Khaled S. Soufi) writes:
>medawar@prism.poly.edu (Bassem Medawar) writes:
>
>>In article <1992Sep29.225504.6097@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu> wmuhanna@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Waleed A Muhanna) writes:
>>>Having skimmed through your proposal, and while I am always interested in 
>>>new ideas on how to transliterate Arabic in Latin, I frankly see little or
>>>no merit in this so-called "AlphaLeb".  Existing Arabic-Latin-Arabic 
>>>transliteration schemes, such as Qalam, can accomodate any dialect of 
>>>Arabic with little or no additions/modification.  
>
>>Great!  Why don't you explain what the Qalam transliteration scheme is?
>>What's its alphabet or mapping rules.. so on.
>
>I don't understand this game.  You are a member of a trio trying to

The game is in your mind only Khaled.  This is a serious discussion.

>invent some "language" that you can label as a non-Arabic language!

The proposed standard is not for a language, it is for an alphabet.
Do you know the difference between a language and an alphabet?  (I wonder)

>Frankly, one would expect *you* to be an authority in linguistics, not

I am not an authority on Natural languages (I know a little bit about
Computer languages though).  Waleed said there is an "Existing Arabic-Latin-
Arabic transliteration schemes, such as Qalam.."  I genuinly wanted to know more
about it because I am REALLY interested in ways to represent ARABIC alphabet
on ASCII terminals.  I am even going into the trouble of saving the Arabic
coding sets that Ibaa is posting and making them available for PUBLIC access
on an anon-ftp host.  If I wanted to replace Arabic with Lebanese, WHY WOULD I
DO THAT????

I personaly consider AlephLeb a short term to medium term solution to 
the problem of representing Lebanese @ammi speech and classical Arabic
on computer screens until display technology makes it common place to display
Arabic alphabet directly on computer screens.  I obviously disagree with Elie 
on the ultimate purpose of AlephLeb, but we agree (at least) on the short term
need for it thus we co-authored it (with Naji).

>Waleed.  I was expecting you to know more about Qalam much less asking
>others what it meant!

Really?  Anybody can come and say, there is an XYZ that does the same thing
and shut up (or worse yet start rediculing what took many months to develop).
If you object to some proposal, fine that is your privilege, but either give 
a counter proposal so that we can discuss its merits versus our proposal and
maybe your proposal would win or KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT!

>I have a little more serious proposal for the three of you that you
>might want to think about.  Knowing that Saied Akl, a definitely much
>better authority on linguistics than any of you three, has miserably
>failed to introduce "Alphaleb" before any one of you was probably even
>born, how about if you speak Arabic-Lebanese backwords :-) That way

I don't see what speaking "Arabic-Lebanese backwords" has any relevance to
this discussion so please stick to serious discussion.

>you would definitely not sound like you are speaking Arabic.  A lot of
>time psychologists attempt to counter some of the phobias their
>patients have.  Even though I am not a psychologist, I bet by speaking
>the language you dread so much, you know, the language of Qur'an
>(woooooohhh), backwards, it might just be a healing process for you
>guys.  I hope you take my proposal much much much more seriously than
>I took yours and good luck.

I am proud that I speak Arabic and will continue to do so.  Your remarks
show that you feel threatened that Lebanese will one day become a recognized
language and the Lebanese identity will start replacing the Arabic identity
in the mind of some Lebanese people.  That is really the issue.  Why don't you
have the courage to stand and say it rather than wrap yourself with
"Arabic-Lebanese backwords" nonesense.

>By the way, I know people who speak Arabic/Lebanese backwords.  This
>certainly is not a bogus proposal.

Good for you.. I hope this gives you your daily doze of entertainment.

>+-----------Khaled Soufi-------------+--------------------------+

bassem
Newsgroups: soc.culture.lebanon