Searching for Arabic words / creating word lists

Question

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!

Answer 1

In the Find Box, there is a button at the bottom left that says “More>>”. Toggle that and then tick “Ignore Diacritics and Vowel Points”. That should do the trick. This choice is also available in the Wordlist Tool Menu in the “View” column.

If this does not work, then you should review your language settings (Project menu/project settings/language settings) on the alphabetic characters tab. Do let me know if you need more assistance.

Blessings,

Answer 2

Thanks so much, @Shegnada, for the quick help! I’m sharing this with him now and will let you know if we have any other questions.