IFAQ

Infrequently asked questions:

What’s the significance of this blog’s name?

It’s a reference to a practice within a method of transliterating Arabic letters into Roman script.

Whenever there are two Arabic letters that could be approximated by the same English letter a dot is inserted underneath to distinguish them from one another.

Such as is used in the ALA-LC ‘Romanization’ method

Aren’t Hats on Vowels enough?

No, if you truly want to excel in your pedantry then hats must walk hand in hand with dots whenever you insert an Arabic word into your writings.

But you’re inconsistent in your own writings and frequently neither dot nor hat!

Yes, I am consistently inconsistent and intend to remain so, although I may lapse into being inconsistently consistent in so doing.

Why does the title look so ugly?

*shrug* I don’t know, probably because there’s a mixture of different fonts and the size discrepancy between the letters makes things look weird.

Why aren’t all the consonants in the title dotted?

Well, after reflecting upon the heavy bias the English alphabet has towards consonants, I figured it’d be better to only dot those letters that would actually be dotted when they are used as substitutes for Arabic letters.

Namely:

ḥ for ح

ṣ for ص

ḍ for ض

ṭ for ط

ẓ for ظ

I’m seeing squares in the text, what gives?

Well you’ve obviously not got the same font that I have installed onto your pc.

Try downloading this font: CharisSIL4.100

Extract all the files and then just cut’n'paste the four TT icons you see there into your font folder which is located somewhere in your control panel.

Why didn’t you answer that question earlier, it would have made more sense to?

I write in the order that things occur to me, not necessarily in an order that would be most useful to the reader.

I still don’t see the point in any of this.

There’s no point other than that I had work to do today and this random musing successfully kept me from it. Now if I can only find a way to make a living from being constantly distracted I will achieve a level of inanity not witnessed since George W. Bush first approached a microphone.

Will you update this blog?

Hmm, probably not. I have a blog already and I’m infrequent as it is with that one, so two would probably be too many to erratically maintain for me.

I might leave this site idle though. I mean I’m ok with idle-atry even if I’m not with idolatry.