Arabic logo quiz!

[qatarperegrine]

When we first moved to Doha, Justin and I drove around taking pictures of company logos in Arabic, in order to put together an identify-the-brand quiz. We never got around to actually making the quiz, though.

Happily, someone else has! Can you name the Companies From the Arabic Version of Their Logo?

We got 100%. :-)

Also, let this serve as a general plug for sporcle.com, one of our chief forms of evening entertainment.

Comments

[dachte.livejournal.com]

12/22 (gave up with 2:18 left). For all but one of the things I missed, it was a product I've probably never had in my life (although I got a fair number of those too).

Fun challenge.

[qatar.livejournal.com]

I think a few of them are unguessable unless you can read Arabic or have seen the sign in Arabic before.

[kit-ping.livejournal.com]

I got 14, and would have gotten 16 if I'd remembered to write down Mountain Dew and Dunkin' Donuts. :)

[jcreed.livejournal.com]

Ah, I just missed "Uncle Ben's"... I had something like "adhka?bndh" transcribed because I mistook nūn for ḏāl, final zāy for final ḏāl, and lām for 'alif.

[qatar.livejournal.com]

All mistakes I have regularly made, especially with weird fonts.

I would not normally explain the differences, but since I know you're all about fonts and linguistics, I'll be pedantic.

Dhal doesn't connect, so if that had been a dhal after the alif, it wouldn't join with the next letter. Lam and alif are easily confused, but again lam connects with the next letter while alif doesn't; since the lam is in the final position here, it has a tail (which makes it easy to confuse with kaf, but lam's tail dips down below the line).

Final zay and dhal still get me sometimes. At first I thought the important difference is their shape, but *actually* the important difference is that dhal sits on the line while zay goes below it. Unless it's fancy cursive, in which case who knows.

Also I'm pretty sure nun and zay are much much more common than dhal, though I've never seen stats on how often different Arabic letters are used. So it's better to err on the side of it being something other than dhal.

So when are you doing an Arabic font of the week? :-)

[jcreed.livejournal.com]

Ah right these are all good things to note.

I had been thinking of an Arabic twf... :) I suppose I should just do all the isolated forms, if I'm just doing an "alphabet" at first rather than a complete font?

[qatar.livejournal.com]

I'd think that's totally legit; otherwise it's way too much work. I mean beyond the 3-4 standard forms you've got things like the taa marbuta and that y without the dots that's pronounced a and whose name I'm blanking on right now, and short vowels, and the shadda, and ligatures like لا.... Way too complicated.

[jcreed.livejournal.com]

Yeah, well it's comparable do doing a few roman fonts of different weights --- which means that it's not a crazy project in general for me (well, except that I have no practice or ambient cultural familiarity with Arabic typography) but a bit much for TWF, yes :)

[qatar.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's what I meant -- I don't doubt you could do it, but I agree that doing just the isolated form would be the right scope for the TWF project.