Ministry of Culture (Lebanon)

وزارة الثقافة

Last modified: 2013-11-27 by zoltán horváth
Keywords: ministry of culture | lebanon | text: arabic (blue) | text: arabic (green) | text (green) |
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image by Eugene Ipavec, 06 March 2012

• Description

• Lebanon

• Ministry of Culture website

The photo galleries at the site of the Lebanese presidency include one captioned "Address by President Suleiman at the launch of Beirut World Book Capital for 2009," which features a white flag with a large blue Arabic letter with green diacritc dots, and Arabic and Latin (French) inscriptions below, also green. The Latin text was obscured, but this is evidently the logo of the Lebanese Ministry of Culture – see http://www.culture.gov.lb/.
The flag next to it might be the municipal flag of Beirut.

Eugene Ipavec, 21 Jan 2010 and 06 Mar 2012

No idea what the large blue Arabic letter with green diacritic dots is. In standard Arabic, only shin and tha have three dots, and this is obviously neither - being shaped like a crudely drawn backwards intial ha, plus the dots. I'm sure this makes sense for anyone with some minimal insight of Arabic calligraphy and orthography. It reads "وزارة الثقافة" (from right to left: waw zain alif ra ta-marbuta, space, alif lam tha qaf alif feh ta-marbuta) which means "Culture Ministry."
A friend of mine who's learned in Classical Arabic informs me that the blue thing, with its three dots, is a tha, initial for "culture."
António Martins-Tuválkin, 06 Mar 2012