> 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 r

> 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.