For all the boneheaded/bad decisions that Mao Zedong made, simplifying the Chinese script turned out to be an excellent one, greatly increasing literacy and having a good side effect of making Chinese writing much accessible and legible at smaller sizes (found in modern print and on screen). When it comes to typing on computer/phones, nowadays Chinese type Latin letters (pinyin) that approximate a Chinese sound, whic…
Unified Arabic
31–40 of 59 posts
Re: Unified Arabic
#32For all the boneheaded/bad decisions that Mao Zedong made, simplifying the Chinese script turned out to be an excellent one, greatly increasing literacy and having a good side effect of making Chinese writing much accessible and legible at smaller sizes (found in modern print and on screen). When it comes to typing on computer/phones, nowadays Chinese type Latin letters (pinyin) that approximate a Chinese sound, whic…
But if it was such a great idea, why is it not an issue in Hong Kong which does not use it?
Re: Unified Arabic
#33Efforts to reform Arabic script made more sense decades ago when illiteracy was high. But once the internet came along, the young people across the Arabic-speaking world who might have once been illiterate, took to literacy very keenly: you had to be at least at little literate to SMS with friends, access internet porn, and get sweet dopamine hits on social media. Suddenly Arabic script turned out not to be that big…
Those same teens came up with Arabizi so they could text. It consists of the Roman alphabet plus the numbers 3,5,7 and 9. It's written left to right and was created for texting on feature phones. Everyone can read it in any Arabic-speaking country. Given that so little is published in Arabic, a change to this grassroots script is long overdue.
All that 5 and 6 and 9 crap is useless and those letter were and could be done with normal latin letters:
5 already has kh, 6 already has t, 9 already has d, don't know what people used for غ but you can write it with gh
Re: Unified Arabic
#34For all the boneheaded/bad decisions that Mao Zedong made, simplifying the Chinese script turned out to be an excellent one, greatly increasing literacy and having a good side effect of making Chinese writing much accessible and legible at smaller sizes (found in modern print and on screen). When it comes to typing on computer/phones, nowadays Chinese type Latin letters (pinyin) that approximate a Chinese sound, whic…
Re: Unified Arabic
#35It's interesting since a lot of language simplification attempts of that era did succeed, off the top of my head, Chinese (in the PRC) and Malayalam
Re: Unified Arabic
#36Even though Arabic script itself isn’t necessarily mentioned in the Quran and Muslims will generally accept that the script itself was “standardized” after the Quran, they would also argue the concept of “Authority of Al-Salaf” which is the belief that the closer the generation is to the prophet, the more authority that generation had on whatever topics they ruled on. There is an important hierarchy of authority in Islam where the Quran is at the top, followed by any saying or a judgement by the prophet, then followed by those of his direct followers, then their followers, then scholars of their followers, then their followers, all the way down to today. Since according to the most accepted story, Arabic and its script were “standardized” in the few decades following the Muslim prophet by his direct followers, you can’t really improve it. Or rather, you have to have a really enormous social influence and respect to be able to even make the slight modifications. There has been few influential Caliphates or scholars in history that have been able to do so, but it’s hard to imagine anyone today with that level of importance or influence.
Re: Unified Arabic
#37You’re up against a tall order trying to modernize Arabic. Arabic is half a language and half a religious practice in itself. Arabic speakers, who are absolute majority Muslims, have explicit statement from God that Arabic is a holy language sent by God as the most perfect language PERIOD. It’s why he chose it for the Quran, and why it should remain unchanged. All attempts to “improve” it would be an admission of som…
I'm not saying this project will be successful and I'm sure the cultural importance of Classical Arabic is one of its obstacles but I don't believe this is a language group that is religiously forbidden to modernize its typography.
Re: Unified Arabic
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those same teens came up with Arabizi so they could text. It consists of the Roman alphabet plus the numbers 3,5,7 and 9. It's written left to right and was created for texting on feature phones. Everyone can read it in any Arabic-speaking country. Given that so little is published in Arabic, a change to this grassroots script is long overdue.
I still maintain to this day that the original usable numbers were 2, 3, and 7. All that 5 and 6 and 9 crap is useless and those letter were and could be done with normal latin letters: 5 already has kh, 6 already has t, 9 already has d, don't know what people used for غ but you can write it with gh
The problem with 6 and 9 is that there are 2 very unrelated sounds for t and d in Arabic. Mixing them is a hallmark of non-native speakers tell signs and to an Arabic speaker’s ear sounds broken. It’s like when German speakers mix th and z sounds in English. It’s very jarring to the ear and requires you to parse the same word you’re reading twice in your mind to tell whether it was 6 or t (or 9 or d) especially that very similar words might exist like 6atreb and tarteb or trab and 6arb. I usually don’t use 6 and 9 either except when I want to emphasis the 6 or 9 sound in a word.
Kh and gh are problematic mainly because you’re relying on the special rule in Arabic that you can’t have 2 constants like k, g and h sounds after one another in a word. You’re relying on the wrongness of a kh or gh construct in Arabic to realize they must be standing for something else. I prefer them tbh, but I get the desire of some to have symbols for them.
غ Is sometimes 3’ but I have seen more gh than 3’ especially that 3’ mixes the academic romanization with the “Arabiz” romanization
Re: Unified Arabic
#39Efforts to reform Arabic script made more sense decades ago when illiteracy was high. But once the internet came along, the young people across the Arabic-speaking world who might have once been illiterate, took to literacy very keenly: you had to be at least at little literate to SMS with friends, access internet porn, and get sweet dopamine hits on social media. Suddenly Arabic script turned out not to be that big…
Those same teens came up with Arabizi so they could text. It consists of the Roman alphabet plus the numbers 3,5,7 and 9. It's written left to right and was created for texting on feature phones. Everyone can read it in any Arabic-speaking country. Given that so little is published in Arabic, a change to this grassroots script is long overdue.
Rate of published words per person per language is a fascinating stat. I did a quick estimate and got Icelandic first, Mandarin last, with Arabic between Russian and Spanish.
Re: Unified Arabic
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those same teens came up with Arabizi so they could text. It consists of the Roman alphabet plus the numbers 3,5,7 and 9. It's written left to right and was created for texting on feature phones. Everyone can read it in any Arabic-speaking country. Given that so little is published in Arabic, a change to this grassroots script is long overdue.
I still maintain to this day that the original usable numbers were 2, 3, and 7. All that 5 and 6 and 9 crap is useless and those letter were and could be done with normal latin letters: 5 already has kh, 6 already has t, 9 already has d, don't know what people used for غ but you can write it with gh