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The Death of the Urdu Script

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Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#101

Post by jey »

pramalin wrote: post #85
Rapzid wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just out of curiosity, what concept is not expressible in English?

Tamil and probably many other Indian languages have various examples: Love as in parental (anbu), as between couples (kaadhal). "How many -eth" (ethanaiyaavathu) child are you to your parents? Many forms of family relationships: younger brother (thambi), elder brother (annan), etc.

Those concepts seem to be expressed just fine. The only difference is that you used multiple words instead of a single word. (I'm a native Tamil speaker.)

Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#102

Post by mchaver »

jpatokal wrote: post #16
mchaver wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author of the article mentions that Naskh does not contain all the letters that Nastaliq has, so if someone types an Urdu text in Naskh it would not have the same underlying Unicode if they had typed it in Nastaliq. Correct me if this is wrong. My assumption is that not all OSes will adopt Nastaliq simultaneously. So assume that the website is storing data in complete coding for Nastaliq and they want to send it…

Yes, that's wrong. The author was talking about that fact that Urdu has more letters than standard Arabic , mostly additional diacritics etc, which makes entering it with an Arabic keypad/keyboard painful. Both Naskh and Nastaliq can be encoded using the Arabic block in Unicode, it's just that Nastaliq's vertically stacking nature makes it difficult to deal with in computer systems that expect clean rows of text.

Ok, I went back over and I did misread that part of the article. The problem is not as complicated as I thought, but that vertical stacking is definitely a challenging problem to handle.

Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#103

Post by wmil »

It seems like something analogous has happened with European scripts. There were huge changes in how characters were presented between different styles of handwriting, engraving, printing presses, and finally everything the computer world has brought us.

It just seems like the author has an extreme emotional attachment to a typeface.

Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#105

Post by wirrbel »

m_mueller wrote: post #24
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…

A note about Fraktur: Even though the wiki article states that the main reason for its downfall was the Nazis forbidding it themselves, as a native German speaker I quite strongly feel it to be associated with Nazi culture - which immediately renders it impossible to use in any context, since you want to be as far from that as you can. Allergic reaction to anything resembling Nazi symbolism is quite strong in German…

I would say it just looks really old fashioned and outdated. But of course this is a matter of perception.

Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#106

Post by wirrbel »

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.

Nitpick on the nitpick: You could not take a German text and change the font type to get proper Fraktur typesetting. It involves using some different rules (final s and inner "s"), ligatures that are context sensitive as well as different punctuation and font "markup" (no bold font but Sperrsatz, etc.).

Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#107

Post by selimthegrim »

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.

Plenty of people in India do this.

Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#108

Post by mchaver »

DCKing wrote: post #61
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 u…

I haven't noticed that about Chinese. Pinyin and Bopomofo are useful input methods but I hardly ever see material actually written in pinyin other than children's books. My kids have never really complained about having to learn characters and find a lot of pleasure in being able to read and write characters.

Most people I hear calling for the eradication of Chinese characters are just a few non-native speakers. Of course, that is just anecdotal, I am sure there are also a few native speakers that hold that view but it seems to be a very small minority.

Post-education most people hand write characters a lot less, but they are still reading characters and producing texts with pinyin/bopomofo/cangjie, etc. There are huge amounts of information being written Chinese with the increase of internet usage in China and increase in education. Unless there is another massive education reform in China, I don't see Chinese characters going anywhere.

Re: The Death of the Urdu Script

#110

Post by sampo »

Rapzid wrote: post #48
pjmlp wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Just out of curiosity, what concept is not expressible in English?

> Just out of curiosity, what concept is not expressible in English?

My native language doesn't force feed gendered personal pronouns on me, so when other languages (English, Swedish, German etc.) do , I feel they are forcing me to be sexist.

(The Swedes are actually trying to take some steps fixing this aspect of their language, by introducing a gender-neutral pronoun.)

Even worse (i.d. feels even more unnatural) are the languages with gendered nouns (German, Spanish etc.).

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