Viewing profile — alieteraz

Note the frowny face. He's a Pakistani. https://twitter.com/kamilwaheed/status/481792094135009280

There are two issues. One is that some operating systems (ios) don't offer the full alphabet. As for those that do (Android/Windows), they don't offer the right script. Hope that h…

BTW. I published this piece in fall of last year. Long before it came on Hacker News, it had been passed around the Pakistani and Indian Twittersphere, and no one there was saying …

The "people of Pakistan" are not a monolith. So some of them want Arabization and some do not and some want Westernization and so forth. As for the ugliness of naskh, its not that …

The Turkish "huzun" is a lot like saudade. You should compare Orhan Pamuk's treatment with Fernando Pessoa.

Respectfully, you are ignoring European history where certain languages were pretty much exclusively rendered in certain "scripts." This was also the case -- and still kind of is -…

You write: "All of them come from Arabic (not just the letters, the scripts) as well, and as an Arabic speaker I find that attitude strange. I could be reading too much into it." I…

You are correct about the history. Unfortunately the Abbasid empire came to an end in 1258 AD and Urdu wasn't even around then. I take your point that naskh has been wide-spread. A…

Great point about German language. I have come across that again and again. And you're right, there ARE Urdu speaking youth now who are basically just as comfortable in naskh as th…

Languages do evolve and die. English itself is changing all the time. Same goes for Urdu. The question here is whether the changes are organic or is there simple oversight going on…

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but if Apple and Android make a nastaliq font part of the directory of fonts that go into their devices from the get go, there wouldn't be a problem…

This is Ali Eteraz. Thank you for recognizing this piece. It was a lot of fun to write. I've actually been to a Ycombinator event. Twice I think. A couple of your alumnus managed t…