Arabic Studies Research Articles

Arabic Windows: Arabicizing Windows Applications to Read and Write Arabic

This paper is technical in nature. It provides detailed instructions for enabling Arabic reading and writing capabilities in most Microsoft Windows versions, the major word-processing applications, and the major Internet web browsers. This paper also discusses useful, time-tested hints and resources for using Arabic with Windows including enabling the Arabic Proofing Tools, enabling the On Screen Arabic Keyboard, typing right-to-left, typing Hindi numerals, defining Arabic romanization keyboards, and finding Arabic fonts, English/Arabic keyboards, Arabic QWERTY keyboards, and Arabic keytop labels. This paper has been adapted from a manuscript the author is currently writing on resources for Arabic language study in America and on the Internet.

Hikaayaat kaliila wa-dimna li-tulaab al-lughat al-carabiyya (Tales from Kalila wa Dimna for Students of Arabic [retold

The title Kalila wa Dimna first came to my attention long ago in my secondyear of Arabic language study. Ahmad Amin mentions Kalila waDimna in passing in his autobiography, Hayati (Cairo: 1952), an excerpt ofwhich I read in Farhat Ziadeh’s Reader in Modern Literary Arabic. Overthe years, I tried occasionally to read a bit of the original and found the classicalArabic intimidating. The task of reviewing Munther Younes’s retellingof these stories represented the opportunity to taste the stories’ flavor withoutthe drudgery of dictionary look-up. Among other accomplishments,Younes simplifies the grammar and lexicon to the point where intermediatestudents of Arabic will understand what they read without excessive struggle.This review will touch upon the structure and substance of Kalila waDimna itself and Younes’ approach to retelling the stories and their utilizationas an Arabic language teaching tool.In the West, most of us hear and then read Aesop’s Fables as children.These stories, which date back as far as 620 BCE, feature anthropomorphicanimals who play out their dramas and conflicts in order to teach a moral.Kalila wa Dimna, attributed to the Indian author Bidpai and written inSanskrit during the third century, does much the same, but also includes asmattering of human characters. As Younes tells us, the Sassanid KingKhosro Anoushrawan sent his physician Burzuwayh to India to collect andtranslate Bidpai’s fables into Persian. In the process, Burzuwayh added storiesby other authors. What had now become a book was then translatedinto Syriac in 570; 200 years later, Abdullah ibn al-Muqafac translated itinto Arabic. Since its Arabization some 12 centuries ago, Kalila wa Dimna