The Death of the Urdu Script

Psychologists in the Dark Time did experiments that showed people couldn't read ALL CAPITAL LETTERS as easily as they could read lowercase. From that, in a wild leap of imagination, they concluded that lowercase letters were easier to read than capitals.

Unsurprisingly, that was garbage. Later psychologists easily documented that the reason test subjects read lowercase text faster was because they were used to it -- the advantage of lowercase quickly erodes as the subjects gain practice reading capitalized text.

What I'm saying is, this problem:

> I am so used to reading Urdu in Nastaliq that I cannot read properly in Naskh

is imaginary, not real.

> The "people of Pakistan" are not a monolith. So some of them want Arabization and some do not and some want Westernization and so forth.

Note how I summarized you as saying "current Pakistanis (overall) want to Arabize". Who's winning? If you're angry about being on the losing side, whining about ugly fonts is misplaced. Whine about the thing you're actually upset about.

>>Who's winning? If you're angry about being on the losing side, whining about ugly fonts is misplaced. Whine about the thing you're actually upset about.

Now you're just being mean. He's advocating (not whining) for a positive step forward. A step that has some political overtones, but also some cultural and artistic merit.

I don't know about the author's state of mind, but generally speaking, this is not just a matter of preference. For those of us who grew up reading Nastaliq, other type faces such as naksh are fairly difficult to read 'fluently.' Imagine if all books, newspapers websites were hand written by someone with poor handwriting. It would actually slow down your reading speed. Reading is such a natural thing we do on a daily basis that we notice even small things which cause us to slow down.

btw, I use 'bad handwriting' simply as a way to explain the effect of different writing style on reading, naksh is not good or bad -- it is just different from what Urdu readers are used to.

Also, nastaliq isn't just different because its letters are formed differently (there being a one-to-one correspondence between different typefaces). Nastaliq letters are laid out in a context sensitive manner where a letter can take on a fairly large number of shapes, depending on where in the word it is (and which letter it is next to). My earlier post links to a paper which describes how Nataliq rendering requires context sensitive shapes. Basically randomly capitalize letters in everything you read online. Eventually you will get used to it, but that doesn't mean it won't be annoying for a long time.

Especially around Lucknow, there are certainly vocabulary differences, and some very minor grammatical ones (matching numbers in verbal phrases, some nouns changing gender, but overall yes, I see your point). I would be interested in your opinion of what Kamleshwar's novel Kitne Pakistan was written in or Munshi Premchand's early work published in Devanagari?

I detest this view. Typical navel gazing, utility-uber-alles (at least for things that "I" am not interested in) programmer who is more concerned with some kind of compatibility (of course using IT examples) than anything else.

Even if we only strictly consider languages themselves, what if some people find pleasure in them? You can't say that what they enjoy doing is wrong with some argument for its utility - because the use and consumption of that language is a utility in itself. Neither can you confine them to these "museums" since they might want to use it outside of the halls of dusty books. Then, so much for "one and only one language".

Now, considering not just the language but culture. Languages are so incredibly context dependent and vague that I think they are deeply intertwined with culture. Outside of whatever you can laboriously define and enshrine in some book to stuff in a museum, there are incredible nuances that can be hard to appreciate if one is not involved with it, through things like social interaction and the written word. If you lose or discard the language of some culture, then you might also lose an appreciation for a lot of subtleties and ways of thinking. Words and expressions that might seemingly translate easily may have nuances that only an active speaker of the language can appreciate.

Thirdly. Consider if we with one magical button could make everyone in the world speak one language, say English. Now we are all on the same page! Then fast forward a few units of time - are we still speaking the same language? Probably, but we might have developed distinct dialects in different corners of the world. Why? Because every society and culture practising the language "evolved", namely added new expressions, words, phrases. Even pronunciation (accents). Why didn't the language simply evolve in the same way, worldwide? Of course because of the fact that the world is made up of a lot of different places and cultures. All of these cultures affect each other, but it's like a web of intermingling sharing. There is, largely, not a single, dominating culture, and so there is no central "authority" on how the language is going to evolve naturally. But you need a single "reference" point for this language to evolve in a uniform way, and avoid a lot of dialects! So if the goal is to have a single language, and a single dialect, your only bet is cultural imperialism. But culture is just a silly thing that just gets in the way, right? Better just stuff them in a museum and adopt a single, standardized culture. It's so efficient!

Given enough time, these dialects might turn into their own languages (let's say that languages are now distinguished by not being mutually intelligible with each other). Then you're back to the same problem, basically. Well, it's a lot better since all of these languages are closely related. And maybe these languages would never really become their own languages, since there is sufficient inter-cultural, global communication to avoid any significant divergence. But to eventually have no dialecs, no linguistic misunderstandings? Something's gotta give, namely everyone has to adopt the same culture and pallet of beliefs and values. But I guess that kind of robotic efficiency would be a Utopia for you.