For Hindi speakers who don't read Nastaliq, the sign on the wall is hilarious. Transliterated to Devanagari, it reads:
हाय मैं मर गई ऐन्ना (इतना) टेस्टी बर्गर
The Death of the Urdu Script
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Re: The Death of the Urdu Script
#72> Utility had defeated tradition. Is that supposed to be self-evidently bad?
Sadly popular opinion seems to be that languages and other traditions must be preserved because, well, we can't lose them. It's certainly good to preserve them in museums so people can use them for research, etc. But there's little or no actual need for more than one language in the world, let along more than one writing system for the same language!
People don't mourn the loss of codepage 437. For many people that's a big part of their growing up. But now it's not in common use and the world is better for it. We don't see people trying to slow the adoption of UTF8 because it's making the world one big dull homogenous borg that's unable to express box drawings.
Nowadays, there's quiet revolution going on in the form of many small dialects disappearing. That's wonderful. It's giving millions the opportunities that come with being able to communicate with more other people by sharing common language. We should be celebrating the massive advantages that keep growing each time another obscure script or dialect becomes nobody's native language.
Re: The Death of the Urdu Script
#73That 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.
> 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
Is it, though?
I'd describe the Roman script as European (since it originated in Europe) without expecting to be corrected, even though the vast majority of people who use it live outside Europe.
Re: The Death of the Urdu Script
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
According to Wikipedia, the difference between Nastaʿlīq and Naskh is much more than just a different font.
And also, according to this discussion, I have also learned that Nastaʿlīq is deeply connected to feelings of origin and pride in (at least some) Urdu speakers, and these are delicate matters.
So why would you even make such an obnoxious, and totally incorrect, reduction of this matter to differences in mere font choices?
Re: The Death of the Urdu Script
#75Earlier 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…
Its kind of like how the Anglicans would resent being
declared Children of Catholicism. Sure, without revolting
against the Church there would not Anglicanism, but that
doesn't mean that an Anglican would like to be told, "you
came from Catholicism."
Re: The Death of the Urdu Script
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 al…
> what matters in this matter is how the people feel about their letters today
Sure. It's a political decision. alieteraz even states that the reason he feels strongly about font choice is politics, and observes that current Pakistanis (overall) want to Arabize more than they already have. But for some reason, the article's arguments amount to "naskh is ugly", which is completely irrelevant to the dispute. (There's also a weird idea that nastaliq presents such insurmountable technical challenges that even if Pakistanis strongly preferred it, for example if naskh was viewed as an affront to Pakistani culture, there would still be no reliable way to type in it. And also that various organizations, from Pakistani governmental departments to Microsoft, have already implemented nastaliq fonts.)
This reminds me quite strongly of Megan McArdle's observation that when an election is actually about gentrification, the attack ads focus on ineffable concepts like "respect", because it's not felt to be workable to say "we want the whites to stop moving in, and in fact we also want the ones who are already here to get out". If you want to fight for Pakistani separation from the Arab cultural sphere, say so, and point out the problems with Arab cultural affiliation. If alieteraz is a true weirdo and Pakistan's choice of font matters more to him than its cultural orientation, he still needs to make the argument for separating from the Arab world, because, as he points out himself, what's actually happening is that the people of Pakistan want to Arabize further.
Re: The Death of the Urdu Script
#77> Utility had defeated tradition. Is that supposed to be self-evidently bad?
These kinds of people decrying losses of languages have existed throughout the ages. It's just that now they have a large slice of the world as their audience instead of their town square/academic halls/whatever.
I say as long as we ("we" being...fuck I don't know) make a concerted effort to translate any ancient texts not yet translated into English, then let it die gracefully. The people crying for these losses will eventually pass and...well, such is life.
Re: The Death of the Urdu Script
#78Earlier 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…
> 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. Saying that Sindhi is Naskh based language while Punjabi is Nastaleeq based language is like saying English is Arial based language while French is Times New Roman based.
The difference is considerably larger than Arial vs. Times. I think it's closer to discussing, in earlier centuries, which European languages used blackletter scripts versus Latin-style scripts. Which is something people actually do discuss, and at times it was a major political issue.
Re: The Death of the Urdu Script
#79its 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…
The cló Gaelach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaelic_type had a similar history.
Re: The Death of the Urdu Script
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
In modern times things are very vague. For example, according to Wikipedia, it's also part of Central Asia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Asia and even South Asia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_asia