[tldoc] Russian translation (texlive-ru)

[Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard]

On 03/04/2017 02:42, Norbert Preining wrote:
> On Sun, 02 Apr 2017, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
>> What I will never understand is how people can remember Chinese or
>> Arabic characters.
> 
> Arabic is easy, right? How many there are, even including the
> initial/terminal/normal variations? A few hundred? That is the amount
> of Kanji ever 10 year student needs to be able to read and write.
> 
Less than that. The arabic alphabet has 28 letters with up to 4 forms,
but 6 of them only have 2 forms, so that's 100 forms, but there are
actually less basic shapes to learn because some letters differ only by
the number and position of dots (17 groups modulo dots), so there's
actually only 60 basic shapes to learn for the alphabet itself.

Then you add a few things that are technically not part of the alphabet
but necessary for writing, like ta marbouta, hamza and its seats,
lam-alif ligature, alif maksura, but that's only two more shapes, for a
grand total of 62 basic shapes (granted, you still have to remember how
many dots where on top of that).

This is not that much more than latin alphabet with its 26 letters each
having an uppercase and lowercase version (plus the handwritten
lowercase version is often substantially different from the typeset
lowercase letter).

In my experience, initial memorisation of the alphabet can go relatively
quickly, what takes more time is being able to read at a reasonable speed.

Manuel