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The Death of the Urdu Script

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Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#31

Post by keypusher »

contingencies wrote: post #13
scrollaway wrote: post #2

That was an amazing article, and a great insight into middle eastern scripts in the digital world. It doesn't look like it'll get out of the new queue, but I wanted to thank OP for sharing it anyway.

Pro tip: Mughul India is not the Middle East, and neither is Pakistan or Iran. There are arabic derived scripts at least as far east as China and the Philippines ( jawi ), but describing them as Middle Eastern is plain wrong - just as you would not describe Balinese or Cambodian as Indus Valley.

According to Wikipedia, Iran is in the Middle East.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East#Traditional_definit...

Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#32

Post by zohaibr »

alieteraz wrote: post #28
616c wrote: post #25

So I skimmed the article once, then read it again. I see the writer is here. I just want to say I understand your sentiment, but your title and content are filled with some annoying misinformation and discrepancies. First of all, Nastaliq is not "the Urdu script". If you even skimmed Wikipedia, you would notice that the script does come oringinally from Arabic (where it is used, but more to your point, sadly not as m…

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. And it is true that it is even in the Indian sub-continent. Sindhi, for example, is a naskh based language. Punjabi, which my parents spoke, on the other hand, prefers nastaliq, and regionally the two places are adjacet. That doesn't mean th…

As a person who grew up reading Urdu in Pakistan- I can attest to the fact that I associate nastaliq with Urdu exclusively. Regardless of the history - his post is about what's currently happening with the Urdu script. If given the opportunity to read Urdu in nastaliq, I would probably read Urdu more often. I have tried reading BBC Urdu various times, and have given up due to the naskh script.

Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#33

Post by 616c »

alieteraz wrote: post #28
616c wrote: post #25

So I skimmed the article once, then read it again. I see the writer is here. I just want to say I understand your sentiment, but your title and content are filled with some annoying misinformation and discrepancies. First of all, Nastaliq is not "the Urdu script". If you even skimmed Wikipedia, you would notice that the script does come oringinally from Arabic (where it is used, but more to your point, sadly not as m…

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. And it is true that it is even in the Indian sub-continent. Sindhi, for example, is a naskh based language. Punjabi, which my parents spoke, on the other hand, prefers nastaliq, and regionally the two places are adjacet. That doesn't mean th…

I understand you might find my comments on history annoying, but I was pointing out a few things because the average reader is not familiar with such things, namely these scripts are not specific to Urdu despite Urdu reading-writing communities appreciating it and there is some undertone that Arabic scripts of lesser beauty are being forced upon Urdu readers and writers. 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.

And thanks for your notes re politicization of Arabic and script. I happen to live in that part of the world, hence I know.

Off-topic: saw your bio blurb and saw what you write about. Sounds cool. I will definitely try to read your stuff when I have some down time.

Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#34

Post by 616c »

zohaibr wrote: post #32
alieteraz wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. And it is true that it is even in the Indian sub-continent. Sindhi, for example, is a naskh based language. Punjabi, which my parents spoke, on the other hand, prefers nastaliq, and regionally the two places are adjacet. That doesn't mean th…

As a person who grew up reading Urdu in Pakistan- I can attest to the fact that I associate nastaliq with Urdu exclusively. Regardless of the history - his post is about what's currently happening with the Urdu script. If given the opportunity to read Urdu in nastaliq, I would probably read Urdu more often. I have tried reading BBC Urdu various times, and have given up due to the naskh script.

I can see the value in said script, but I have to live a more pratical lifestyle: as an IT guy, if I could stop reading English, Arabic, or Persian every time it is in an ugly font, I would.

And if you want to see ugly fonts, try Arabic news sites. BBC, Nastaliq or Naksh, have nothing on Al-Jazeera or Al-Arabiyya.

Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#36

Post by llllllllllll »

ibrahima wrote: post #30
adamnemecek wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is whether languages are really worth preserving. I'm not a native English speaker yet I don't really have much emotional attachment to my first language. In fact, my life would have been easier if I grew up speaking English. And it's not that I think that English is somehow inherently a better language, it's more that there is a lot more people speaking it. It's kind of like if you are deciding what ope…

I feel much the same way (though, considering I learned English at the age of 4 and never really learned much more of my parents' language after that, calling English my second language is grossly misleading). I feel a vague attachment just because my grandfather was a professor of Bengali literature and I'd like to be able to read his work, but I don't sweat over the fact that my grasp of the language is very basic.…

The analogy to open source projects is spot on

Except that when an open source project dies, its code remains in full -- to study, take ideas from, or even potentially be revived at a later time.

When a language dies though, it's pretty much gone. Even if it's received a lot of attention from field linguists, it's near impossible to fully codify the grammar and document the nuances of any language.

Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#37

Post by Someone »

wirrbel wrote: post #18

its an interesting read and I acknowledge the intent to keep the traditional and authentic writing system for Urdu. I have a few thoughts on this though. One would be the legibility. Of course I cannot judge legibility of writing systems I do not like, but it seems that nastaliq would be hardly readable on a lot of mobile devices and I wonder how difficult learning the ornate script is. I am talking about alphabetiza…

Minor nitpick: fraktur is not an alphabet, it is a style that some fonts exhibit. So "nowadays we use the latin alphabet" is not a change.

Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#39

Post by 616c »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #11
gioele wrote: post #9

Meanwhile, in the free software world... https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ySTZaXP5XKFg0OpmHZM0... https://github.com/behdad/harfbuzz/blob/master/test/shaping/... (Harfbuzz is the default text layout engine for Linux GUI frameworks: Qt, GTK, etc)

This talk at Google by Roozbeh Pournader is very good at laying out the issues with bidirectional language issues in software. This is a non-trivial problem and is rarely ever solved correctly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOEzYefrqo4

And not so ironically, Behdad Esfahbod, one of the original developers of HarfBuzz, works for Google now, according to his blurb on Github.

https://github.com/behdad

I actually emailed him a few times before I discovered mlterm to read Arabic and other RTL fonts in a terminal (you might ask why: file names and I use mutt for email). Very nice guy, and I am very appreciative of this library.

Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#40

Post by pjmlp »

adamnemecek wrote: post #22
alieteraz wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. My view is that the problem is of oversight, and of disregarding the Urdu speaking and writing user. If the world's most popular operating systems were designed in Pakistan or Iran and they were not offering enough English language letter…

The question is whether languages are really worth preserving. I'm not a native English speaker yet I don't really have much emotional attachment to my first language. In fact, my life would have been easier if I grew up speaking English. And it's not that I think that English is somehow inherently a better language, it's more that there is a lot more people speaking it. It's kind of like if you are deciding what ope…

Although English is seen as the lingua franca of the 21st century, it wasn't always like that.

In the several millions we are able to speak and write, there have been lots of languages taking that role.

And even English is not as common as many people think, just traveling around the world will teach people that there are many places where knowing English will be of no help.

Besides languages represent culture, not all concepts are expressible across all languages and they are also a door to our past as mankind, sure they are worth preserving.

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