Salam Iftikhar and Eid Mubarak, Thank you for the positive fedback, it's most appreciated. I've forwarded your e-mail to the Quranic Arabic Corpus discussion mailing list (archived here: http://www.mail-archive.com/comp-quran@comp.leeds.ac.uk/). I think that you raise some interesting and valuable ideas about the use of the corpus. I look forward to seeing this happen at some stage inshallah.
I would be interested to know other's opinions on this? w/salam, -- Kais ------------------------------------------- From: Iftikhar Zaman[SMTP:iftikhar.za...@gmail.com<smtp%3aiftikhar.za...@gmail.com> ] Sent: Friday, September 10, 2010 7:31:25 AM To: Kais Dukes Subject: Congratulations on work done, directions to expand and a place to discuss such expansion Auto forwarded by a Rule Great work (http://corpus.quran.com)! I am sure you are busy wrapping up things to finish your dissertation. I had actually put a young man to work on this very thing (morphological and syntactical tagging of the Quran) here--and he had done considerable work. But, alhamdulillah, yours is a finished product and quite well done at that. I see no place on the site for discussions of where we could take this project further: in terms of adding information and in terms of requested features for people who would like to use this data in different applications--so I am writing directly to you. So far I see people using this corpus to learn Arabic and the Quran. This will probably remain the heaviest use. But maybe a more significant use might be that of research. To begin with, you have put us in a position to discuss the available English translation. The discussion of the translation will bring the English user closer to the original. A gross example already in the corpus is the use of the word "umm" as "fundamental" or "basic." Comparing the way various translators translate this particular usage of the word "umm" (as opposed to its other use in the sense of "mother") we would bring the user of the corpus in front of the translator's problem and he would see how this use of "mother" is metaphorical. But a feature would facilitate and even guide users to this kind of examination of the corpus. We need to be able to get from a particular translation of a word to the other usages of the word and the significant differences in the translations of the word--both in that very ayah and across the entire Quran. We would want a filter of some sort, to help focus on (1) the differences in translation, (2) the significant differences in translation, (3) the significantly different usages of that word. In any case. There is much more to say. This is an invaluable tool you have developed. Once again, congratulations. Iftikhar
