7 ms·

> That's quite an interesting theory. Do you have any good books on the topic? It's an idea that comes up in online discussions from time to time but is gener

> That's quite an interesting theory. Do you have any good books on the topic? It's an idea that comes up in online discussions from time to time but is generally not taken seriously by academics because it completely ignores the fact that most non-Latin languages do in fact lend themselves quite well to being written as the composition of smaller elements used in a printing press. It's the same sort of argument made about keyboards to explain "why China, Japan, and India haven't produced as many prolific computer scientists", completely avoiding the fact that keyboards for Chinese, Japanese, Devanagri, etc. have existed for over a hundred years.

mkaziz 11y ago
Urdu, Arabic and Farsi in particular (all using the Arabic script) do not. Urdu, for example has 38 letters, and most of those letters have 2-3 forms depending on whether they are in the beginning, middle and end of the word. Additionally, the letters have to be joined at precise places, otherwise the text becomes illegible real fast. Hindi, Chinese and Japanese, by contrast, may have many characters, but each character is a distinct element.
- Cyph0n 11y ago
  In addition, Arabic has symbols that can appear either above or below each letter that usually change the meaning of a word completely. For example: عالِم (pronounced a'alim): scientist عالَم (pronounced a'alam): world Notice the difference is essentially the "i" and "a" yet the entire meaning changes. I'd imagine this would add complexity to the mechanisms employed by printing equipment back then.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    So, like world and word? Where a single letter changes the entire meaning?
    - Cyph0n 11y ago
      No, the letters are exactly the same. The change is caused by adding an accent above or below the letter, in this case the letter pronounced like "l" in English.
      - kuschku 11y ago
        Well, English has situations where the word is written the exact same way, but pronounced differently. The case that accents change meaning is also existing even in many european languages. So, it’s not like latin-1 doesn’t deal with those issues either. I’d assume it’s more other issues that are problematic with Arabic script.
      - thaumasiotes 11y ago
        > the letters are exactly the same. The change is caused by adding an accent above or below the letter This is a pretty myopic view of what's significant in writing. Why are you calling the consonant a "letter" and the vowel an "accent"? Would you apply the same rigorous distinction to é, which is a full letter (specifically Latin Small Letter E with Acute, U+00E9), vs é, which is a letter e with a combining accent above?
        Cyph0n 11y ago
        The correct terminology is a diacritic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_diacritics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_diacritics
        thaumasiotes 11y ago
        There is no meaningful difference, for this purpose, between letters and diacritics; it is nonsense to say that "fit" vs "fat" is an easy, simple contrast because 'i' and 'a' are "letters", while the analagous distinction in Arabic is tricky because it is represented in different glyphs. They're all glyphs.
- chimeracoder 11y ago
  > Hindi, Chinese and Japanese, by contrast, may have many characters, but each character is a distinct element. That's not... really true about Devanagri and related scripts like Bengali, Marathi, etc. At least, no different than the Arabic scripts as you describe it. They have the same considerations with multiple forms per letter (as many as five per-letter, not counting variations in size and joining or conjunct forms), along with the issues regarding character joining affecting meaning in critical ways. Nevertheless, these problems have pretty straightforward solutions when it comes to typesetting. It's also worth noting that English had many of these same problems as well at the time of the printing press, which is why handwritten English before the 15th century looks so different from what we read today. We literally dropped letters from the English alphabet due (in part) to this problem.[0] It's frustrating to see this argument persist because it has next to no evidentiary support by accepted literature, and it comes dangerously close to psuedoscientific post-hoc rationalizations of European political dominance. (e.g., phrenology being used to "explain" why Europeans were able to make scientific advances during the Enlightenment whereas African and Asian societies allegedly "weren't"[1]). [0] For example, the printing press is a major reason that we no longer use the thorn in written English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)#Middle_and_Early_Modern_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)#Middle_and_Earl... [1] which is wonderfully ironic given where numerals in European languages come from (spoiler: originally India, by way of Arabia), but I digress.
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
    > We literally dropped letters from the English alphabet due (in part) to this problem.[0] Going by your link, there was no technological difficulty at all with printing thorns. Rather, what happened was that England imported type rather than manufacturing it, and foreign type didn't include English-specific letters. > the substitution of Y for thorn soon became ubiquitous, leading to the common 'ye', as in 'Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe'. One major reason for this was that Y existed in the printer's type fonts that were imported from Germany or Italy, while thorn did not.

mkaziz 11y ago

Urdu, Arabic and Farsi in particular (all using the Arabic script) do not. Urdu, for example has 38 letters, and most of those letters have 2-3 forms depending on whether they are in the beginning, middle and end of the word. Additionally, the letters have to be joined at precise places, otherwise the text becomes illegible real fast. Hindi, Chinese and Japanese, by contrast, may have many characters, but each character is a distinct element.

Cyph0n 11y ago
In addition, Arabic has symbols that can appear either above or below each letter that usually change the meaning of a word completely. For example: عالِم (pronounced a'alim): scientist عالَم (pronounced a'alam): world Notice the difference is essentially the "i" and "a" yet the entire meaning changes. I'd imagine this would add complexity to the mechanisms employed by printing equipment back then.
- kuschku 11y ago
  So, like world and word? Where a single letter changes the entire meaning?
  - Cyph0n 11y ago
    No, the letters are exactly the same. The change is caused by adding an accent above or below the letter, in this case the letter pronounced like "l" in English.
    - kuschku 11y ago
      Well, English has situations where the word is written the exact same way, but pronounced differently. The case that accents change meaning is also existing even in many european languages. So, it’s not like latin-1 doesn’t deal with those issues either. I’d assume it’s more other issues that are problematic with Arabic script.
    - thaumasiotes 11y ago
      > the letters are exactly the same. The change is caused by adding an accent above or below the letter This is a pretty myopic view of what's significant in writing. Why are you calling the consonant a "letter" and the vowel an "accent"? Would you apply the same rigorous distinction to é, which is a full letter (specifically Latin Small Letter E with Acute, U+00E9), vs é, which is a letter e with a combining accent above?
      - Cyph0n 11y ago
        The correct terminology is a diacritic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_diacritics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_diacritics
        thaumasiotes 11y ago
        There is no meaningful difference, for this purpose, between letters and diacritics; it is nonsense to say that "fit" vs "fat" is an easy, simple contrast because 'i' and 'a' are "letters", while the analagous distinction in Arabic is tricky because it is represented in different glyphs. They're all glyphs.
chimeracoder 11y ago
> Hindi, Chinese and Japanese, by contrast, may have many characters, but each character is a distinct element. That's not... really true about Devanagri and related scripts like Bengali, Marathi, etc. At least, no different than the Arabic scripts as you describe it. They have the same considerations with multiple forms per letter (as many as five per-letter, not counting variations in size and joining or conjunct forms), along with the issues regarding character joining affecting meaning in critical ways. Nevertheless, these problems have pretty straightforward solutions when it comes to typesetting. It's also worth noting that English had many of these same problems as well at the time of the printing press, which is why handwritten English before the 15th century looks so different from what we read today. We literally dropped letters from the English alphabet due (in part) to this problem.[0] It's frustrating to see this argument persist because it has next to no evidentiary support by accepted literature, and it comes dangerously close to psuedoscientific post-hoc rationalizations of European political dominance. (e.g., phrenology being used to "explain" why Europeans were able to make scientific advances during the Enlightenment whereas African and Asian societies allegedly "weren't"[1]). [0] For example, the printing press is a major reason that we no longer use the thorn in written English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)#Middle_and_Early_Modern_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)#Middle_and_Earl... [1] which is wonderfully ironic given where numerals in European languages come from (spoiler: originally India, by way of Arabia), but I digress.
- thaumasiotes 11y ago
  > We literally dropped letters from the English alphabet due (in part) to this problem.[0] Going by your link, there was no technological difficulty at all with printing thorns. Rather, what happened was that England imported type rather than manufacturing it, and foreign type didn't include English-specific letters. > the substitution of Y for thorn soon became ubiquitous, leading to the common 'ye', as in 'Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe'. One major reason for this was that Y existed in the printer's type fonts that were imported from Germany or Italy, while thorn did not.