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Unified Arabic

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Re: Unified Arabic

#51

Post by eddythompson80 »

nervai wrote: post #49
eddythompson80 wrote: post #36

You’re up against a tall order trying to modernize Arabic. Arabic is half a language and half a religious practice in itself. Arabic speakers, who are absolute majority Muslims, have explicit statement from God that Arabic is a holy language sent by God as the most perfect language PERIOD. It’s why he chose it for the Quran, and why it should remain unchanged. All attempts to “improve” it would be an admission of som…

>Arabic speakers [...] have explicit statement from God that Arabic is a holy language sent by God as the most perfect language PERIOD This is wrong and I couldn't find a serious source stating anything like it. There's nothing in the Muslim faith that suggests the Arabic language itself is holy or sent by God. The whole post reads a bit like a rant against Arabs suggesting their background precludes adaptation or so…

Arabic has absolutely a special place in Islam and to Muslims. It’s the language god chose deliberately to communicate his final message to humans, as a well as the language where religious practices in is the “most rewarded” compared to reciting rituals in other languages. Islam and Arabic are permanently intertwined because the Quran, the literal word of God, is very intentionally in Arabic

Re: Unified Arabic

#52

Post by kalb_almas »

nervai wrote: post #49
eddythompson80 wrote: post #36

You’re up against a tall order trying to modernize Arabic. Arabic is half a language and half a religious practice in itself. Arabic speakers, who are absolute majority Muslims, have explicit statement from God that Arabic is a holy language sent by God as the most perfect language PERIOD. It’s why he chose it for the Quran, and why it should remain unchanged. All attempts to “improve” it would be an admission of som…

>Arabic speakers [...] have explicit statement from God that Arabic is a holy language sent by God as the most perfect language PERIOD This is wrong and I couldn't find a serious source stating anything like it. There's nothing in the Muslim faith that suggests the Arabic language itself is holy or sent by God. The whole post reads a bit like a rant against Arabs suggesting their background precludes adaptation or so…

In my experience there is an implicit understanding that Arabic is at least as close to perfect as it gets. The basic reasoning is that the Quran is perfect and written in Arabic, therefore Arabic is perfect. Nobody says this explicitly so the logic doesn't have to be airtight, but native Arabic speakers in Arabic contexts do tend to behave as if this is the case.

Re: Unified Arabic

#53

Post by Timwi »

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #7

It's easy to see how it could simplify typesetting, I would think computers though have that mostly covered now. Making Arabic easier to read is interesting, it would help new learners potentially, but I am not surprised that existing readers and writers might not warm to the idea. I wonder if Simplified Mandarin isn't a little similar, mostly accepted, but with a little pushback. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpli…

Computers do not “have that mostly covered now”. Typesetting and font rendering technology is so Western-centric and so entrenched that support for writing systems with slightly different base assumptions, such as Arabic, Devanagari and many others, is always an afterthought.

Re: Unified Arabic

#54

Post by Timwi »

xdennis wrote: post #32
insane_dreamer wrote: post #25

For all the boneheaded/bad decisions that Mao Zedong made, simplifying the Chinese script turned out to be an excellent one, greatly increasing literacy and having a good side effect of making Chinese writing much accessible and legible at smaller sizes (found in modern print and on screen). When it comes to typing on computer/phones, nowadays Chinese type Latin letters (pinyin) that approximate a Chinese sound, whic…

Mao did not simplify Chinese. The First Chinese Character Simplification Scheme simply adopted simplified characters in common use. But if it was such a great idea, why is it not an issue in Hong Kong which does not use it?

Your comment could be read as implying that Unified Arabic, the subject of this post, must have been useless as an idea because it wasn't widely adopted.

In reality, there are many factors, not only pure practicality, that lead people to reject reforms like these. In the case of Arabic, it was deeply held traditional values; in the case of Hong Kong and Taiwan, well, I imagine it's simply an unwillingness to appear to be aligning with a regime one politically disagrees with.

Re: Unified Arabic

#55

Post by Timwi »

mohsen1 wrote: post #35
InfiniteRand wrote: post #12

It's interesting since a lot of language simplification attempts of that era did succeed, off the top of my head, Chinese (in the PRC) and Malayalam

Turkish as well. They moved from Arabic to Latin script.

It could be argued that Turkish and simplified Chinese succeeded simply because they were supported by, you could even say imposed by, a government that controls > 90% of the population speaking the language. Neither was the case for Arabic: there is no single government spanning that proportion of Arabic speakers, and from how I read the article, it seems no government really supported Unified Arabic to any extent even remotely comparable to Turkish and simplified Chinese.

Re: Unified Arabic

#56

Post by Timwi »

devolving-dev wrote: post #46

I don't think Arabic script is that hard. It's nearly phonetic, unlike English. It's not super broad and hard to memorized like kanji. I don't know, maybe I'm just removed from the struggles of people learning it for the first time.

By saying it “isn't that hard” you're admitting that it could definitely be easier.

Re: Unified Arabic

#57

Post by nervai »

kalb_almas wrote: post #52
nervai wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Arabic speakers [...] have explicit statement from God that Arabic is a holy language sent by God as the most perfect language PERIOD This is wrong and I couldn't find a serious source stating anything like it. There's nothing in the Muslim faith that suggests the Arabic language itself is holy or sent by God. The whole post reads a bit like a rant against Arabs suggesting their background precludes adaptation or so…

In my experience there is an implicit understanding that Arabic is at least as close to perfect as it gets. The basic reasoning is that the Quran is perfect and written in Arabic, therefore Arabic is perfect. Nobody says this explicitly so the logic doesn't have to be airtight, but native Arabic speakers in Arabic contexts do tend to behave as if this is the case.

Native Arabic speakers don't speak anything resembling Quranic Arabic though. And modern written Arabic is also very different from Quranic Arabic, to the point native speakers need training to understand the Quran.

I think what you mean is that they believe the Quran itself is literary perfection and sent by God through the last prophet, and that is indeed the belief.

But Arabs neither speak nor write like the Quran, and to the best of my knowledge they are well aware that their written and spoken languages have evolved through the centuries (as evidenced by the many Arabic dialects).

Re: Unified Arabic

#58

Post by eddythompson80 »

nervai wrote: post #57
kalb_almas wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience there is an implicit understanding that Arabic is at least as close to perfect as it gets. The basic reasoning is that the Quran is perfect and written in Arabic, therefore Arabic is perfect. Nobody says this explicitly so the logic doesn't have to be airtight, but native Arabic speakers in Arabic contexts do tend to behave as if this is the case.

Native Arabic speakers don't speak anything resembling Quranic Arabic though. And modern written Arabic is also very different from Quranic Arabic, to the point native speakers need training to understand the Quran. I think what you mean is that they believe the Quran itself is literary perfection and sent by God through the last prophet, and that is indeed the belief. But Arabs neither speak nor write like the Quran…

To some extend. Most Arabs would understaff 95% of the words and sentences in the Quran with any special training. Some vocabulary is no longer used and you might need to look those words up. What you often need training on however is called Tafser which is about comprehension. To correctly interpreting what those phrases and analogies imply or trying to communicate with the correct context and be able to correlate different parts of the Quran together. It’s like the difference between an average layman being able to “read” a quantum mechanics book, and actually comprehend it.

However, as mentioned most Arabs also believe that Quranic Arabic is that perfection. As a result, you don’t need to “improve” Arabic, individual people need to learn more Quranic Arabic that’s all. You would frequently see religious figures speaking in Al-Fusha to sound closer to Quranic Arabic. Not quite speaking in the convoluted nonsensical way of the Quran, but close enough to trick people’s ear into it. K-12 education teaches “Arabic” classes to every kid where they learn the “proper” Arabic often using the Quran and poetry from around the same time as the Quran as the reading and study material.

Re: Unified Arabic

#59

Post by leviathan »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #38
leviathan wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still maintain to this day that the original usable numbers were 2, 3, and 7. All that 5 and 6 and 9 crap is useless and those letter were and could be done with normal latin letters: 5 already has kh, 6 already has t, 9 already has d, don't know what people used for غ but you can write it with gh

When I used to communicate in Arabiz I would rarely use 5, 6 or 9 too, but I get why they are there. The problem with 6 and 9 is that there are 2 very unrelated sounds for t and d in Arabic. Mixing them is a hallmark of non-native speakers tell signs and to an Arabic speaker’s ear sounds broken. It’s like when German speakers mix th and z sounds in English. It’s very jarring to the ear and requires you to parse the s…

My village's name is خنشارة - written in latin as Khenchara. There's precedent for this for kh, so it carries easily to gh as well.

My last name starts with a ق and in latin it's written with a K.

The tools were just to provide a way to write letters that do not have a corresponding letter in latin alphabet, it's not a way to provide all the nuances of pronunciation.

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