The Death of the Urdu Script • Hacker News Board

Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#91

Post by alieteraz » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 1:43 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #76

sampo wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Note the frowny face. He's a Pakistani.

https://twitter.com/kamilwaheed/status/481792094135009280

Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#92

Post by triangleman » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 1:55 PM UTC

eshvk wrote: post #50

sharjeel wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This is rather confusing. IIRC both Arial and Times New Roman let you express all 26 alphabets. Now if Naskh has Nastaleeq have differing number of characters, is this a mere font issue or is there something more fundamental differing between the two?

restalis, FYI you have been hellbanned, so no one can read your posts unless they are logged in and have "showdead" turned on.

Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#93

Post by paperwork » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 2:04 PM UTC

A big reason nastaliq is not widely available on our screens is because rendering it correctly requires 'context sensitive shape substitution'[1]. Simple substitution of one character for another is not enough.

I've spent a couple of hours looking at how to render my own text, perhaps using something like http://typeface.neocracy.org/, but my day to day work is so far from text layout, rendering, client side javascript that it would be (too) large an undertaking.

[1] http://ww.cle.org.pk/Publication/papers/2006/context_sensiti... [PDF]

Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#94

Post by mkaziz » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 2:13 PM UTC

Yardlink wrote: post #72

jey wrote: post #8

> 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…

I think the concern is more the loss of literature written over the ages in a language. Equally importantly, language - as an extension of culture - shapes the way people think. Different people thinking differently is how problems can get solved, instead of monstrous uniformity you seem to be envisioning.

Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#95

Post by DCKing » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 2:20 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #65

DCKing wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What definition of "to express" are you using? Because expressing does not come with a single word restriction that I know of. I think you mean whether or not there is a translation of a certain word?

We were talking about concepts being "expressable" in any language. Of course many words are not directly translatable (half of Chinese isn't, that isn't news to anybody), so that's not particularly interesting. But you'd be hard pressed to find a concept that is not at least explainable in English.

Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#96

Post by wolfgke » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 2:22 PM UTC

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…

Although Antiqua is used almost ubiquitously in Germany, Fraktur still has its proponents in Germany (mainly among older people). Just to give one reason, which I consider as pretty convincing: Fraktur has two different small s (long s and round s)

> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraktur_%28Schrift%29#mediaview...

while Antiqua only has one. Since in German combinations of st, sp are pronounced differently and in German words are concatenated by juxtaposition, this can lead to situations where writing a German word in Antiqua can make it non-unique: Consider the word "Wachstube". Written in Antiqua it can either mean "Wach[-]stube" (guardroom) or "Wachs[-]tube" (tube of wax). If you write this word in Fraktur, it is clear, what word is meant:

> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wachstube.svg

I only explained the situation for the small s. There are lots of other rules, too. For details see

> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraktursatz

Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#97

Post by VLM » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 2:23 PM UTC

alieteraz wrote: post #19

adamnemecek wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. I feel like languages/scripts dying out has some advantages too.

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…

"English itself is changing all the time."

As a writing style, cursive is basically dead. This would have made an awesome analogy for the original article essay. Very few Americans in gen X and younger actually write cursive and there are efforts to remove it from the curriculum.

I can sign my name in cursive when I write a legacy paper check (a couple times a year) or sign forms. Thats about it. I now write legacy paper checks in block capitals and only use cursive for my .sig. I would have to check wikipedia to see how to make a cursive capital "F" and some of the weirder letters (what is a cursive Q?)

It presents some problems to genealogy, I have trouble reading centuries old census forms because I haven't read cursive since grade school, some decades ago. In grade school we were told we will have to write all our papers in cursive in middle school and up; not so; all typed, mostly on computers.

Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#98

Post by wolfgke » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 2:38 PM UTC

Someone wrote: post #37

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.

This is not true: Fraktur has two small s (long s and round s)

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7944021

and some ligatures that in German word have to be used or not depending on whether the letters of the signature seperate syllables or not.

Consider the German words "Tatzeit" (time of the crime) and "Tatze" (paw). For Tatzeit you must not use an tz ligature since the z is the beginning of a new syllable. On the other hand for "Tatze" you have to use the tz ligature.

So the Fraktur ligatures carry a meaning on the pronunciation of the German words that is lost when writing them in Antiqua.

Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#99

Post by cabalamat » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 2:52 PM UTC

contingencies wrote: post #81

cabalamat wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Would you describe a page of written Vietnamese or Hanyu Pinyin as European? That's a fairer comparison to the author's turn of phrase.

I would describe the scripts they're written in as European. The languages themselves aren't, obviously.

Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#100

Post by stan_rogers » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 3:06 PM UTC

Dirlewanger wrote: post #77

jey wrote: post #8

> 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 wil…

Translation is an admirable goal, but so is preseervation. Not necessarily the "preservation" that implies that the languages will remain in day-to-day use forever; rather the "preservation" that implies that a complete (or nearly complete) grammatical description of the language, along with a relatively comprehensive vocabulary, will be recorded. That has more than historical interest, since the varieties of language and linguistic structures can tell us an awful lot about how language itself works in humans. It's sort of like doing astronomy/cosmology now (or at least recording the observations we can make now) will tell us very different things than we could possibly find out after the cosmic microwave background has become undetectable and galaxies outside of our gravitationally-bound local cluster have receded beyond the visibility threshold (where space between us and them is expanding at a rate faster than the speed of light). Before Hixkaryana was described, it was thought that OVS was "impossible". Amharic "made no sense" until Greenberg noticed something going on with adpositions (mostly prepositions, but a few incipient postpositions) that indicated that it was only partway through the process of settling into SOV from the ancestral VSO. That, in turn, indicates that there is something to the idea of markedness hierarchies, which, in turn, might be giving us an insight into something more fundamental about the way we're wired up.