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  TFNA
  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.
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  musictubes
  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.
• pavel_lishin
  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.
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  BrandiATMuhkuh
  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
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  blacksmith_tb
  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/Simplified_Chinese_characters
• woggy
  Interesting, never heard of this. But it looks so, so wrong.
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  insane_dreamer
  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?
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  mettamage
  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?
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  InfiniteRand
  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
• devolving-dev
  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.
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  eddythompson80
  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.
• aaroninsf
  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.
• AbuAssar
  Good in theory, bad in practice
• SilasX
  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.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commentaries_on_the_Laws_of_En...
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