alt Hacker NewsUnified Arabic
Comments
My biggest problem letter is mim. It essentially disappears in a lot of styles. If I was more fluent I’m sure I’d recognize the words more readily and know when to look for it. I don’t find the rest of the letters too difficult even at my basic level.
I was struck by the lack of books in the homes of even educated people in Yemen. I once went to a book fair in Sana’a that was well attended. Think it was on a college campus. I don’t remember seeing many novels in Arabic, they were mostly in English and French. I had been told that if someone sent me any books in the mail they would have to be cleared by the censor before I would get them. That pretty much equated to never getting them. The book fair was a relief. I picked up David Copperfield and Women in Love and that was enough to last me until I made a trip out of the country.
One of the hardest thing for me when reading Arabic is to identify the start and end of letters. I have started using monospace Arabic font with little gaps. Works great. https://github.com/eliheuer/hasubi-mono
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.
This made the rounds on HN a few ... weeks? months? ago, and it's also about Arabic typesetting, and it's a very interesting read: https://lr0.org/blog/p/arabic/
I'm a little surprised that Nasri Khattar wasn't mentioned in it.
I once was curious about possibly learning Arabic. I left more confused after my initial research than I went in.
What's a good Arabic dialect to learn such that you're as intelligible as possible?
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
Good in theory, bad in practice
The delicate discussion of why this project failed does not obscure its actual shape. The failure to embrace has cost decades of progress in most critical dimension of society.
I hope that's recognized and progress occurs.
[flagged]
[dead]
[dead]
Efforts to reform Arabic script made more sense decades ago when illiteracy was high. But once the internet came along, the young people across the Arabic-speaking world who might have once been illiterate, took to literacy very keenly: you had to be at least at little literate to SMS with friends, access internet porn, and get sweet dopamine hits on social media. Suddenly Arabic script turned out not to be that big of a problem after all.