A good example in Arabic would be قرن, which can mean 'horns' or 'century', and (as far as i know, not an expert) doesn't have any related origin.
I imagine if you were writing machine translation software you could pretty easily figure it out statistically from nearby words, but it adds another level of challenge to learning the script.
As an aside; if anyone has any interest in learning the _script_ used by Arabic/Persian, 'The Arabic Alphabet: How to Read & Write It' by Awde and Samano is awesome, and you can burn through it with all the exercises in a few dozen hours total. The book makes no attempt at teaching the language, but it's a nice leg-up before you hit the real books, which seem to all do an abbreviated job of teaching the script.
A good example in Arabic would be قرن, which can mean 'horns' or 'century', and (as far as i know, not an expert) doesn't have any related origin.
I imagine if you were writing machine translation software you could pretty easily figure it out statistically from nearby words, but it adds another level of challenge to learning the script.
As an aside; if anyone has any interest in learning the _script_ used by Arabic/Persian, 'The Arabic Alphabet: How to Read & Write It' by Awde and Samano is awesome, and you can burn through it with all the exercises in a few dozen hours total. The book makes no attempt at teaching the language, but it's a nice leg-up before you hit the real books, which seem to all do an abbreviated job of teaching the script.