Whilst learning classical Arabic it was a pain when reading to search through the Hans Wehr dictionary by first extracting the root letters of the word and then looking up the root and then finding the correct form.
So I put together a frontend [1] to search a scanned version I found of it. It has now evolved in to an offline PWA, which you can search from Arabic to English and English to Arabic, convert numbers in both classical or modern Arabic form, stem words etc. When searching in Arabic it removes affixes, prefixes, suffixes and also uses multiple stemming algorithms to obtain the root if an exact match is not found.
It's pretty neat and makes reading so much easier no matter what device I'm on. It's also used by other professors, teachers, students and friends who are also in the classical Arabic field.
Well you've found an عيب in the dictionary! Currently it uses a single dictionary, Hans Wehr, which doesn't contain that word (I've checked in my physical copy also).
In my backlog is adding additional dictionaries to fill in where Hans Wher is lacking, with next in line Lane's Lexicon. Hans Wehr is a good dictionary for students and contains approximately 90% of the words they will encounter in their first few years of studying. The issue I'm having at the moment is that both dictionaries are structured differently and it requires some manual work to unify their structures.
When searching a verb you can either search the root letters, or any other form even with affixes attached and the stemming algorithms should get the right root word.
Great. Good luck with adding new dictionaries and thank you for your efforts.
By the way, have you seen the work of Taha Zerrouki. He has produced many open source tools to deal with Arabic language [1]. Thought you might be interested.
My website was originally a Flask web app which used his Arabic number converter, Arabic stemmer, Arabic normaliser and other modules. But in order to use offline as a PWA I end up porting these to JavaScript. I will release the source code once tested properly and porting is completed.
Also just going through your blog, enjoying the summary of Abul Hasan Ali Nadwis book. Keep up the good work!
Edit: Also Taha's work is amazing and on the back of that I've been creating a programing language specifically for string processing, so it can be used for stemming algorithms etc which compiles to multiple other languages.
The idea is to hopefully port Taha's work over and hopefully benefit communities of other programing languages.
That will definitely be useful for students, especially some of my classmates.
Is this open source? If so i may contribute where possible
Also, a feature request (if your taking them) is a vocabulary learner and a way to test yourself and mark your progress.
So I put together a frontend [1] to search a scanned version I found of it. It has now evolved in to an offline PWA, which you can search from Arabic to English and English to Arabic, convert numbers in both classical or modern Arabic form, stem words etc. When searching in Arabic it removes affixes, prefixes, suffixes and also uses multiple stemming algorithms to obtain the root if an exact match is not found.
It's pretty neat and makes reading so much easier no matter what device I'm on. It's also used by other professors, teachers, students and friends who are also in the classical Arabic field.
[1] - https://dictionary.ilmwaa.ml/