Comments on: Dubai – math and science

By: zac

zac — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 01:23:05 +0000

Thanks, Samaritan. I have updated the post.

Well, they looked like Arabic numbers to my inexperienced eye!

[Explanation: I originally wrote that the first 3 characters with red background were Arabic numerals...]

By: Samaritan

Samaritan — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 19:21:23 +0000

Just wanted to correct you.

The red part of the license plate where you’ve said those 3 characters are numbers… they aren’t.

They are arabic letters. They are:
Meem – A’in – Alif

They may look similar but I assure they aren’t. And thats an Abu Dhabi license plate xD. Though I can imagine quite a few of those around Dubai.

By: zac

zac — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 00:54:24 +0000

Hi Maddy. Oops – I missed Del’s point before. The word was written twice and close together, the first one was correct but the second was incorrect.

Doh!

I have fixed the second one as suggested. Thanks for the feedback.

By: Maddy

Maddy — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 15:53:12 +0000

Hello everyone,
Dal you are right because the word “Qibla” should not be spelled like this “Qilba”. It should be spelled like this: “Qibla”. The word “Qilba” is above the “Qibla” photo. Please change the to the word.
Thank You.

By: zac

zac — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 01:06:06 +0000

Hi Del and thanks for your input.

I actually have “Qibla” (not “Qilba”), which is the transliteration given by the Wikipedia article that I quoted from.

According to Google, the number of Web pages that use the different forms of the word (in decreasing order of occurrence) are:

Qibla 848,000
Qiblah 700,000
Kibla 493,000
Qi’blah 85,000
Kiblah 63,000

Seems that “Qibla” is the most common transliterated form – but “most common” doesn’t necessarily mean “most correct”.

Thanks again for your updates.

By: Del

Del — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 16:47:54 +0000

Hi… If I may correct you.

You mentioned “Qilba” in the middle of your post. The correct term is “Qi’blah”, the direction towards Mecca.

Also, readers might be interested to know the Arabic term “souk” means “shop” or place of business.

Just FYI.

By: zac

zac — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 06:34:25 +0000

Hi Brent. Actually, I was wondering about the same thing. We do actually write numbers right to left in the sense that we right-align numbers when adding them and add units first (on the right).

So good point.

We actually read numbers left to right, of course.

By: Brent

Brent — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 02:10:52 +0000

Perhaps it’s not so much that numbers in Arabic are writen left-to-right, as that they are written right-to-left with the least significant digit first? =)