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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
We shipped an internal tool once where font choice alone cut support tickets in half. Nobody believed typography mattered until it did. If a monospace hack fixes Arabic legibility, that's a real product decision, not a nice-to-have.
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.
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.
Small nitpick: it's "Simplified Chinese," not "Simplified Mandarin" - the script change wasn't specific to Mandarin, it affects written Chinese across dialects. That said, the comparison holds up well otherwise, similar backlash from people who learned traditional/unsimplified forms.
Reminds me of another story about older scripts being hard to read:
I found a paperback with Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England[1]. In the intro, it explains how they made the deliberate decision to render them as pixel-for-pixel copies of the original texts, so you could get the most pure, unadulterated form.
I'm like lol whatever, you act like you're doing the world a huge favor by not transcribing it into something legible for modern readers, forcing them to navigate around stuff like the s's looking like f's. No, dude, anyone who actually needs that level of authenticity is a scholar who already knows how to find the originals. You don't want that in a publication for a mass audience.
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?
Arabic doesn't need it because it's based on a finite number of letters and each letter is a sound, pretty much like latin.
It does also contain a 4x2 nunation[1] system that acts as short vowels and/or stress but it's apart from the stress, it's optional and can be mostly* derived from context.
Simplified Chinese don't make much sense. The idea is that humans write everything manually forever, so simplifying saves time. But that's moot with computers that system coupled with high resolution monitors, and IMO it just leaves less clues for learners and less literate to infer meanings. They're also less visually balanced than the traditional.
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.
HK/Taiwan kept traditional partly out of politics, not because simplified was worse. Same story with EBCDIC vs ASCII, Betamax vs VHS — installed base and identity politics beat technical merit more often than not.
There's an Arabic version of pinyin called Arabizi which consists of the Roman alphabet plus the numbers 3,5,7 and 9. It's written left to right and was created for texting on feature phones. Everyone can read it in any Arabic-speaking country. Given that so little is published in Arabic, a change to this grassroots script is long overdue.
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.
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.
But it's mostly like all the dialects, with some extra stuff on top that the dialects tend to drop.
I'd say if you just want to quickly be able to speak with people around you, learn the local dialect, but if you want to really learn Arabic long-term, learn fusha, and you'll have easier time understanding most dialects later.
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.
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 some problem or some deficiency which is heresy in itself. How can you improve on what God has already declared perfect? The solution is often to go back to the older style of Arabic instead of your local dialect if you really want the perfect Arabic, not to invent new concepts.
Even though Arabic script itself isn’t necessarily mentioned in the Quran and Muslims will generally accept that the script itself was “standardized” after the Quran, they would also argue the concept of “Authority of Al-Salaf” which is the belief that the closer the generation is to the prophet, the more authority that generation had on whatever topics they ruled on. There is an important hierarchy of authority in Islam where the Quran is at the top, followed by any saying or a judgement by the prophet, then followed by those of his direct followers, then their followers, then scholars of their followers, then their followers, all the way down to today. Since according to the most accepted story, Arabic and its script were “standardized” in the few decades following the Muslim prophet by his direct followers, you can’t really improve it. Or rather, you have to have a really enormous social influence and respect to be able to even make the slight modifications. There has been few influential Caliphates or scholars in history that have been able to do so, but it’s hard to imagine anyone today with that level of importance or influence.
>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 something of the sorts.
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.
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
Doesn't matter who's right theologically. Bring "unified Arabic" to prod and someone's going to treat it as heresy-by-committee. That's the outage you didn't plan for.
This seems wrong. There's a lot of diversity in Arabic, there has been modernization in Arabic, and the Quran does not declare Arabic a perfected language. Arabic has changed already.
I'm not saying this project will be successful and I'm sure the cultural importance of Classical Arabic is one of its obstacles but I don't believe this is a language group that is religiously forbidden to modernize its typography.
Maybe I was wrong in saying it “declares it perfect”, but the Quran declares itself as “sent in Arabic, clear and free from crookedness” or in “a clear Arabic tongue”. Scholars (from Ahl Al Salaf, so they have more authority) often interpreted that as God deliberately choosing Arabic to communicate his message as Arabic was the best language that God chose to communicate his final message in its clearest form to humans. There are further sayings by the prophet that reciting the Quran and prayers in full proper Arabic has a special place to God.
There were modest attempts at reform and improvements, but they were never titled as “improvements” or “modernization” especially that the latter is a word with negative connotations in Islam, but rather as something more pragmatic or logistical like the adoption of new words, or dropping some complex rule or style.
There is indeed a great diversity in Arabic, but there is 1 “correct” Arabic which is the Quranic/Classical Arabic. Egyptian, Levantine, Hejazi, and Maghrabie are only some of the main variations on Arabic, but all those speakers would agree that it’s not the “correct” Arabic. Reciting the Quran or quoting the prophet in such dialect would be extremely disrespectful. Most religious authorities might speak in that dialect to help with communication, then revert to Classical Arabic when quoting either of those.
The most “moderination” Classical Arabic got was Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) which was really about accepting some simplified grammar and prose in professional writing rather than introducing anything completely novel or new. It made it acceptable to write books or articles in simpler prose rather than requiring or expecting the extremely elaborate writing style of true Classical Arabic. Most importantly, it didn’t forbid or declare anything from Classical Arabic “outdated” or “wrong” but rather just saying “it’s a bit too much, maybe”
The resistance to modify the typography is definitely there, but I wasn’t saying that it will necessarily succeed in preventing the modification. The Quran in its 7th century form will have to remain the authority on Arabic, followed by all the writings and literature of the following centuries. However you can find the Quran written phonetically in “Academic Romanization” format as Muslim view it more of a translation of sorts, rather than an actual reproduction of the Quran. I don’t know of any “Arabiz” versions of the Quran, and I suspect it would be viewed as disrespectful by many, but I won’t be surprised if some were on the internet or would appear in print at some point.
FWIW, I don’t think many (of the reasonable people) would oppose the changes proposed by this typography changes, but I suspect that most would either view it as strange or unnecessary because at the end of the day it just looks like a broken font more than anything.
Edit: Theology gets complicated but The Mu'tazilite split in the 9-10th century was mainly about the true nature of the Quran. They argued that it was a created vs being an eternal attribute of God. They lost the debate in the Muslim world and the opinion that won was that the Quran was the literate word of God that is eternal and wasn't created but always existed. The debate wasn't about language, but language (being the medium of the Quran) was part of it where Mu'tazilite had to try to define the difference between expression, and linguistic limitations in communication. They lost the debate and their influence weaned in general though left remnants in post-prophet history of Islam.
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.
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.
Has anyone actually tested reading speed on this versus traditional forms? Removing positional variants sounds like it'd help typesetting, but Arabic readers lean on word shape (not letter-by-letter) for fast recognition — flattening that might hurt fluent readers even if it helps beginners.
