> One other point I'd make is that I think people may be accidentally overestimating the friendliness of English for printing I don't think so to be frank. Whe

> One other point I'd make is that I think people may be accidentally overestimating the friendliness of English for printing I don't think so to be frank. When compared to Japanese or Arabic, once could say English was created solely for printing. I'm a native Arabic speaker, so I can appreciate why people would claim it's a difficult language to print. Word processors and some browsers, to this very day, sometimes have trouble rendering Arabic properly, especially when it comes to linking characters and Arabic punctuation. > Telegrams historically looked like crap... they couldn't even have punctuation!. English punctuation does not significantly alter meaning in my opinion. You have sentence-ending punctuation, which is used to differentiate mainly between a statement and a question. Then you have separator punctuation, like commas, semi-colons, and colons. I don't see them making much of a change either. And finally, the apostrophe and quotation mark. In addition, telegrams are short messages, so there usually is no need to convey complex meanings. Therefore, it would have been a slight inconvenience for telegram users at most. In Arabic, changing a punctuation mark above a single letter in a word can change the word's meaning entirely. Furthermore, letters are linked together to form words - this is not essential, but would make things much more difficult to read. Also, the position of a letter in a word dictates its "shape". This introduces a ton of variation to the letters of the language, making it difficult for even modern keyboards to get right. I'd imagine it would have been even more complex at the beginning. Of course, I think that the main barrier to widespread adoption of the printing press in the Arab World was more related to demand than anything else. At the time of the Industrial Revolution and slightly before it, the Arab countries' least concern was printing books, as they were too busy dealing with the imperialist occupation.