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The Death of the Urdu Script

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Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#61

Post by DCKing »

jey wrote: post #8

> Utility had defeated tradition. Is that supposed to be self-evidently bad?

I don't think it's a bad thing either.

Those scripts will not be forgotten soon because of the way information is preserved in our current age. Nothing of their historicity is lost to us at all. Yet this script (and many others) do not present compelling reasons to stay in use. The same goes for Chinese characters; the knowledge of this script among Chinese youth is waning simply because these characters are not as useful as pinyin romanization is. It's "natural selection".

From my limited knowledge, only some "effective" scripts in the world that translate efficiently to a digital age. From the top of my head, only Latin, Cyrillic, (other descendants of Greek) and Hangul script feature a small enough 'standardized' amount of characters to express a wide variety of information. That is what is needed to survive in a digital age methinks.

Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#62

Post by [deleted] »

alieteraz wrote: post #54
616c wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 let…

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 think that's where our disconnect lies and I do think you're reading too much into it. Urdu is not a child of Arabic. The word itself is Turkish, and the old story about Urdu's genesis is that it amalgamated during the military conquests o…

[deleted]

Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#63

Post by pjmlp »

alieteraz wrote: post #56
pjmlp wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of examples. Citing just two out of my mind. Feierabend (German) - expresses the concept you are finished with the work duties for the day and can enjoy your private time with family and friends Saudade (Portuguese) - a mixture of loneliness, melancholy, sense of loosing part of you feelings, even mixed with a kid of sad joy, while remembering something that is no longer there.

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

Thanks for the hint. Although I imagine reading a translated version won't be quite the same thing.

Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#65

Post by pjmlp »

DCKing wrote: post #58
pjmlp wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of examples. Citing just two out of my mind. Feierabend (German) - expresses the concept you are finished with the work duties for the day and can enjoy your private time with family and friends Saudade (Portuguese) - a mixture of loneliness, melancholy, sense of loosing part of you feelings, even mixed with a kid of sad joy, while remembering something that is no longer there.

You just expressed these in English. Although you might spend far more words on it, and it might be hard to properly capture abstract concepts in another language, these are not examples of concepts that cannot be expressed in English.

> You just expressed these in English.

From linguistic point of view, I explained them.

Expressing means there is an English word with the same meaning.

Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#66

Post by scrollaway »

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.

The article talks about two arabic scripts. Saying "Middle eastern" is more inclusive than saying "arabic" and while it does not include pakistan, it does almost reach it. Kind of like when we talk about Europe and increase the reach a bit more. Or when you say "the United States" when you really mean north america (a much worse offender since you talk about a country). This was my logic when writing it.

I'm not a history expert. I would love a history lesson but you seem like a very poor teacher, "picking" on people who just try to be nice. I did not know this article was going to be on the frontpage as I said in my original comment - I caught it at 2 points. Had I known my comment was going to go through a seven-way review by a wide variety of experts, I'd have just said "non-latin scripts" to be on the safe side. (/s)

Sorry for the rant - People correcting each others where correction does not at all matter bothers me to no end. It feels like a sneaky and thoroughly annoying way of flashing your "I know THINGS!" credentials.

Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#67

Post by pjmlp »

viraptor wrote: post #52
pjmlp wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of examples. Citing just two out of my mind. Feierabend (German) - expresses the concept you are finished with the work duties for the day and can enjoy your private time with family and friends Saudade (Portuguese) - a mixture of loneliness, melancholy, sense of loosing part of you feelings, even mixed with a kid of sad joy, while remembering something that is no longer there.

You did a pretty good job expressing those concepts in English in your post. Sure, there's no single word for each of those expressions, but that only means they're not that popular in everyday usage. If they were popular enough, we'd say: English does have words for those ideas! They're "feierabend" and "saudade". Exactly the same as "gesundheit".

Thanks for the compliment, however I feel from the linguistic point of view, I explained them.

Expressing means there is a similar word.

Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#68

Post by thaumasiotes »

alieteraz wrote: post #54
616c wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 let…

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 think that's where our disconnect lies and I do think you're reading too much into it. Urdu is not a child of Arabic. The word itself is Turkish, and the old story about Urdu's genesis is that it amalgamated during the military conquests o…

If your goal here is really to "reject[] the cultural Arabization of South Asia", have you considered writing your Urdu in... devanagari? Using nastaliq is already a pro-arabization move.

Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#69

Post by sampo »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #68
alieteraz wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think that's where our disconnect lies and I do think you're reading too much into it. Urdu is not a child of Arabic. The word itself is Turkish, and the old story about Urdu's genesis is that it amalgamated during the military conquests o…

If your goal here is really to "reject[] the cultural Arabization of South Asia", have you considered writing your Urdu in... devanagari? Using nastaliq is already a pro-arabization move.

Apparently Nastaʿlīq was (a) developed in Iran (which is not an Arab country), and although it was developed as a combination of Nasḫ (Naskh) and Taʿlīq scripts, (b) it was never really used in the Arab lands, but in the Persian, Turkic, and South Asian spheres of influence.

So if the people in Pakistan feel that Nastaʿlīq is "their own" writing system and Naskh symbolizes Arab imperialism, in my opinion they have all the rights to feel that way.

Really, even if the script evolved from Arabic script, that was 700 years ago, and what matters in this matter is how the people feel about their letters today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasta%CA%BFl%C4%ABq_script

Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#70

Post by oblio »

llllllllllll wrote: post #36
ibrahima wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I doubt that a language dieing in 2014 would be completely gone from all record.

Almost all the languages that we "lost" did not have a rich literature or sometimes even an alphabet.

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