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I don't think the sounds matter as much as the sound patterns. You can certainly make up diacritics and letters that fit the visual style of Arabic or Latin scr
by mchaver 11y ago
I don't think the sounds matter as much as the sound patterns. You can certainly make up diacritics and letters that fit the visual style of Arabic or Latin script to make up for missing sounds in a particular language. I assume (I could be wrong though) that Arabic and Hebrew writing and vowel patterns are such that a native speaker, and literate, can read well without that vowel diacritics since most words are based on tri-consonant roots (though I understand modern Hebrew has a lot of borrowed words from non-Semitic languages). In languages without consonant roots, if you remove the vowels, it seems to create a lot more ambiguity. I wonder if there are any studies on that?
- gotchange 11y agoYou could definitely use diacritics to write Arabic-specific letters in Latin script but why would you do that? I can understand the use case of Arabic transliteration in Latin script languages but other than that it becomes very impractical and inconvenient as the Latin alphabet was devised to represent the sounds common among the Europeans at inception and mutatis mutandis for Arabic. So, it doesn't make any sense to use the Latin alphabet and overload the letters just to transmit the Arabic language through it. The tri-consontant root is another problem and big hurdle for adopting the Arabic script in other languages as it's by design terse and there are a lot of implicit stuff due to omitting weak or short vowels from the words and this could prove problematic for some speakers of other languages. However, the Latin script is still not optimal and there are tradeoffs made in the languages based on it.