Hello All, We get quite a few e-mails from users with feedback about the Quranic Arabic Corpus (usually positive), but the e-mail below stood out so I thought it might be worth sharing this. I think the e-mail below is an interesting example of a learning process that might be fairly common. Clearly this user like many others relies on the website being accurate. Hopefully once the message board is online again over the next few days, colloborative annotation and corrections to tagging can continue. It looks like based on recent discussion, we've also come up with a good list of potential future additions for later versions of the tagged corpus. Hopefully one aim for this year (2010) is for the syntactic treebank project to be expanded to cover the whole Quran.
Kind Regards, -- Kais Dukes Language Research Group School of Computing University of Leeds http://corpus.quran.com - The Quranic Arabic Corpus comp-quran@comp.leeds.ac.uk - Computational Quranic Arabic discussion list ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Muneem Wahid <munim.wa...@googlemail.com> Date: Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 7:02 PM Subject: Learning Quranic grammar Waalykum assalaam Kais, Many thanks for getting back to me so quickly - much appreciated. It's excellent to hear that you hope to complete the whole Qur'an by 2010 inshallah - a great achievement indeed. I must say that I literally stumbled across your website and was initially bamboozled as to what on earth it was ('treebanks' etc, not the Quran obviously). It is only later on that I learnt a little more about it that I started to get to grips with it. However, do not be fooled, I am a complete beginner. Because you were curious, i'll give you a brief synopsis; I have been meaning to learn Arabic (to understand the Quran) for almost a year now, but much like everyone else, 'never had the time'. I recently started taking a few lessons in Arabic and have started on grammar. This is proving to be a minefield for me as I have never been mathematical or logical so to grasp the complicated (to me anyway) concepts of grammer is proving difficult. Anyway, to cut a long story short. I came across your website and have found that your absolute precision with respect to each individual word is helping me much in order to understand the grammar and 'literal' meanings much more. Terms like 'morphology' and 'syntax' were alien to me until I came to understand them through your site. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that just by reading the Quran and then its meanings, I was struggling to make connections between the English and the Arabic. With your site, i am more easily able to spot patterns, tenses, objects/subjects and the many other grammatical components. This in turn allows me to add meaning to each Arabic word component to the point that, as an example, when I hear the word 'Al-ardh', there isn't the 'translation process' taking place in my brain to elicit 'The land/earth' and instead I'm able to understand it as meaning 'the land/earth' just as I would if I read it in English (Hope all that drivel made sense!). I should apologise for not being able to contribute towards the project. I've read much of your site and see that you welcome contributions from linguists and other professionals. I'm merely the 'average joe' trying to learn more. Maybe you could give me some advice about learning Arabic. I would love to learn it to a deep level in order to understand the richness and beauty of the Quran. i was contemplating on going to Syria for a year to study but realised that I do need to learn the basics. Wassalaam, Munim
