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TFNA 1 days ago [-]
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.
musictubes 1 days ago [-]
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.
greazy 1 days ago [-]
The lack of books and therefore lack of reading leads to reduce vocabulary. I read somewhere the average of known words by an Arabic speaker was substantially lower than English speakers.
When I switch to speaking Arabic (poorly) I struggle to find words because my vocab level is so bad. Imagine for an every day person, not being able to effectively express themselves. It would lead to a ton of frustration, miscommunication and misunderstanding.
I really need to improve my Arabic!
CoastalCoder 1 days ago [-]
That really interesting.
To be fair, modern "English" is a nebulous smorgasbord of words from a lot of different languages. I'm sure we could afford to drop a lot of the words from clusters of synonyms.
RetroTechie 6 hours ago [-]
You can take those 'useless', redundant synonyms from my cold, dead brain cells!
leapingdog 13 hours ago [-]
I recall a team working on machine translation starting by translating English into a simpler form before translating that into the target languages. This was a couple of decades ago. Perhaps not a new idea even then.
BrandiATMuhkuh 1 days ago [-]
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
CoastalCoder 1 days ago [-]
I had a similar issue yesterday with classical Greek. Some website used a typeface that renders one of the diacritics in a totally unfamiliar way.
I had to copy and paste the text into another doc and change the typeface to understand.
adrian_b 18 hours ago [-]
I suppose that you refer to the circumflex accent, because that can differ wildly between Greek typefaces.
Some render it similarly to a French circumflex accent, others render it like a tilde.
blacksmith_tb 1 days ago [-]
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.
mettamage 1 days ago [-]
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?
neitsab 1 days ago [-]
When I was studying it, we were told Syro-lebanese was the cleanest and most easily understandable, with Egyptian a distant second despite being quite peculiar due to widespread popularity of their media production.
za3faran 1 days ago [-]
Fus-ha Arabic (High Arabic) is intelligible as it is used in official communication, academia, news papers, documentaries, etc. But obviously it is not spoken day to day.
InfiniteRand 1 days ago [-]
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
shuwix 21 hours ago [-]
And English :) to LOL Fook this. Fook that. Bro.
Younger generation of simplified brains will come up with even more simplified languages.
insane_dreamer 12 hours ago [-]
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, which then reveals Chinese characters that relate to that sound, which they can then select. it's much faster than using root strokes to "build" the character. I was wondering if any similar technique is used in Arabic?
AbuAssar 1 days ago [-]
Good in theory, bad in practice
20 hours ago [-]
aaroninsf 1 days ago [-]
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 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.
When I switch to speaking Arabic (poorly) I struggle to find words because my vocab level is so bad. Imagine for an every day person, not being able to effectively express themselves. It would lead to a ton of frustration, miscommunication and misunderstanding.
I really need to improve my Arabic!
To be fair, modern "English" is a nebulous smorgasbord of words from a lot of different languages. I'm sure we could afford to drop a lot of the words from clusters of synonyms.
I had to copy and paste the text into another doc and change the typeface to understand.
Some render it similarly to a French circumflex accent, others render it like a tilde.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters
I'm a little surprised that Nasri Khattar wasn't mentioned in it.
What's a good Arabic dialect to learn such that you're as intelligible as possible?
Younger generation of simplified brains will come up with even more simplified languages.
When it comes to typing on computer/phones, nowadays Chinese type Latin letters (pinyin) that approximate a Chinese sound, which then reveals Chinese characters that relate to that sound, which they can then select. it's much faster than using root strokes to "build" the character. I was wondering if any similar technique is used in Arabic?
I hope that's recognized and progress occurs.