Hello,
I’m assisting an Arabic project and a reviewer would like to know if anyone has experienced this issue when searching for words:
“When I work with Arabic words to e.g. find a list of words with same spelling, it does not yield any useful results and misses almost 99% of relevant search words, because it strictly matches (Letters + Diacritical marks). In Arabic, every single word can have tens of possibilities of diacritics depending on its position in the phrase and its meaning. So, it is better that when we search a word, we don’t consider diacritics; We should only consider basic letters to find all nearly similar words (e.g. ا & إ & إٍ & إِ & أ & أُ & أَ & أً & أُ & أٌ and maybe more, are all written interchangeably with the same meaning in different Arabic dialects which do not strictly follow Modern Standard Arabic grammar rules).”
He notes that on Google and Word searches, there is a possibility to search like this: “We can use google style for searching which allows showing close instead of strictly similar words. 2) we can use MS Office search, within documents, which considers the root letters without diacritics. I think both can solve the problem and make the different valuable search tools, useful for Arabic language users of the program.”
Is there a way to search for words in Paratext like this already that I can inform him on?
Appreciate any responses, thanks!
