The Short Obligatory Prayer Project Discussion

[Parsa]

The main page for the Short Obligatory Prayer by Baha'u'llah is found on this site.
Short Obligatory Prayer by Baha'u'llah

More information can be found at the Project Page.

This board is for discussions on this project.

Parsa

[Parsa]

The Short Obligatory Prayer pages are still being updated.
As of 17 Jan 2007, I uploaded the pages listing the languages, but most of the links still don't work. This will take a while.

I am posting a few example prayers to use as templates in each section.
In European languages, English and French are online.
In African languages, I uploaded Swahili (Mimi ninajua kiswahili. Nilifundisha katika shule pili katika nchi ya Kenya kwa miaka mawili!)
Invented languages is "done"; there are only two in there anyway. (Mi parolas esperante!)

Parsa

[Parsa]

I am currently working on European Languages, simply because they are easier to transcribe for me. Most are Latin alphabet based which means making the pages is easier. I did do one non-Latin based language so far: Belarusian. It took me the time it takes to do several Latin-alphabet languages to do that one page. Each cyrillic letter has to be converted into unicode decimal format. If I knew cyrillic better it would be faster. 
I originally had the prayers that did not use common European letters and accented symbols in an image format. This had the advantage that anyone could see the image, but the drawback of not being able to change it easily.

The web site tries to force a Unicode font on PCs and Macs, but if you don't have one of the three Unicode fonts I've selected, you may have difficulty seeing the letters. If that's the case try: 1. downloading a good unicode font and using that in the browser preferences. 2. setting your text encoding to "Unicode (UTF-8)" in the "View" menu.
Information on unicode fonts for different computers can be found on the following pages: [Windows] [Mac OS X] [Mac OS 9] [Unix].

Parsa

[Parsa]

I have completed putting the European prayers online. Now we can begin to add to them and update the ones that are already online. I have updated Greek with a new authorized translation. The old one from the Baha'i World was in the polytonic system. It had lots of diacritical marks on the vowels. In 1982 the writing system was changed (simplified) to a monotonic system. The translation now on the site is in this newer system.

The European languages page now has the following features:

• The most current academic name in English.
• The native name for the language.
• A three letter code from the international ISO 639-3 language code set if available.

I intend to write to various national Baha'i bodies to get updated texts. If you know one of the languages, or have the prayer from a prayer book, I'd appreciate getting it.

Parsa

[Parsa]

I've done A-K in the African languages (plus a few of the later ones as well). That's about half of the African languages that are finished.
http://www.bahai-site.org/writings/african.html

Parsa