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Arabic is a Semitic language; Turkish and the other Turkic are not. Vowels are an afterthought to Arabic writing, that is not the case with Turkish. Yes, you ca

Arabic is a Semitic language; Turkish and the other Turkic are not. Vowels are an afterthought to Arabic writing, that is not the case with Turkish. Yes, you can write Turkish (more properly, Osmanli) using Arabic script. For that matter you can write Spanish using Arabic script and for many years many people did. But in both of these cases, you're shoehorning a language into a script that really isn't appropriate for it.

alnitak 10y ago
> Vowels are an afterthought to Arabic writing. Are you an Arabic speaker? This claim is a bit stretched. Yes, short vowels are written as diacritic symbols on consonants, which are often dropped from mass publications. However, long vowels are an essential part of the language and they are indeed present as their own letters in Arabic.
Koshkin 10y ago
But the Arabic alphabet is already being succesfully used in Iran and Pakistan, to give a couple of examples, for languages that are very different from Arabic.
gotchange 10y ago
> Vowels are an afterthought to Arabic writing, That's an orientalist claim. Vowels do exist in Arabic but some foreign learners of the language don't get the distinction between short and long vowels and how the letters "ا و ي" have dual role as consonants and vowels as well. > you're shoehorning a language into a script that really isn't appropriate for it. Here's a phonetic transliteration of your first sentence in Arabic "Arabic is a Semitic language; Turkish and the other Turkic are not." "أَرَبِك از أَ سِمِتِك لانجوِﭺ، تِركِش أَند أَذَر تِركِك أَر نَت" By the way, this is the Egyptian convention since the "g" sound is missing in Modern Standard Arabic.
- mysterypie 10y ago
  Great example! I had the misconception that Arabic had no vowels. I fed your Arabic transliteration into Google Translate[1], clicked on the "speak it" icon for the Arabic, and I could hear a comprehensible English sentence: https://translate.google.com/m/translate?hl=en#ar/en/أَرَبِك%20از%20أَ%20سِمِتِك%20لانجوِﭺ،%20تِركِش%20أَند%20أَذَر%20تِركِك%20أَر%20نَت%22 https://translate.google.com/m/translate?hl=en#ar/en/أَرَبِك... If Arabic had no vowel sounds then this should have been impossible! [1] Ignore the English translation which is meaningless and irrelevant. In this case I'm using Google Translate for speech synthesis, not for translation.
- Mediterraneo10 10y ago
  That vowels are an afterthought in Semitic scripts is not an “Orientalist claim” at all, it’s completely mainstream archaeology. The use of some consonant letters to denote long vowels (as so-called matres lectionis) was a development subsequent to the use of a purely consonantal writing system. With regard to Turkic, one of the challenges with using the Arabic script is not just that Turkic has a larger vowel inventory than Arabic or Persian, but the frontness/backness of vowels plays a major part in the morphophonemics. The Orkhon script that was the first used for Turkic languages was designed to reflect this, but when the Arabic script was introduced in towards the Middle Turkic era new strategies had to be thought up to reflect frontness/backness, e.g. the use of Arabic emphatic stops versus non-emphatic ones. However, the solutions that were found left a lot of room for ambiguity. I often read Kazan Tatar documents in the old Arabic script, and I can understand how the plethora of rules and exceptions confused the masses prior to the introduction of the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. (The Cyrillic script now in use is hardly better than the Arabic script, though)
  - gotchange 10y ago
    This is how all alphabets came into being: 1- Egyptian hieroglyphs 2- Sinaic script 3- Phoenician script. Then alphabets evolved from that like Latin and Greek with all the bells and whistles. Semitic scripts on the other hand remained true to its roots and didn't evolve to have dedicated vowels early on. Arabic as a Semitic language descended from Syriac and Aramaic and thus lacked distinct vowels. Heck early Arabic script didn't make any effort to differentiate similar looking consonants as diacritic were totally missing. Case in point, Hejazi Script, one of the early Arabic scripts lacked vowels, vowel diacritics and consonant diacritics but only possessed the defining quality of cursive/adjoining writing. However, for later versions of the Arabic script, things improved substantially esp. when it had the full support and backup of the then-young and burgeoning Islamic state, and thus it underwent a complete overhaul where it got all the bells and whistles of other alphabets but retaining a few distinctive features like compactness. So, yeah you can say that vowels were afterthought in early Arabic scripts but definitely not for the current system in use for centuries now and that's why I characterized his/her statement as an orientalist claim that's completely inaccurate and improper. For Ottoman Turkish, I get the frustration that some Turkish speakers may have had with reading or writing in Arabic script. Original Arabic script is not supposed to be a drop-in replacement for any language. It needs first to be extended and re-purposed to meet the requirements of the target language and with languages like Turkish with a wider selection of vowels, it gets tricky to work around the limitations of the script like vowel diacritics. Absent these additions and workarounds, it becomes more advisable to make the switch to more accommodative script like Latin and forgo the succinctness and terseness gains of the Arabic script and that's why I view Kurdish written in Arabic script as a big mess as the developers opted to full hard code of the vowels in the script while dropping vowel diacritics altogether.
- balnaphone 10y ago
  The parent post has a "چ" or "cheem" character, which is neither Arabic nor required in this case. That character is used in Persian, Urdu, Pashto, etc., but not in Arabic. A more phonetic transliteration of "Arabic is a Semitic language, Turkish and the other Turkic languages are not" is: أَرَبِكْ ازْ أَ سِمِتِكْ لانجوِج، تِركِشْ أَندْ اُذَرّ تُركِكْ لانجوِجزّ أَرْ نَتْ which you can listen to a robot speak by visiting https://translate.google.com/#ar/en/أَرَبِكْ%20ازْ%20أَ%20سِمِتِكْ%20لانجوِج،%20تِركِشْ%20أَندْ%20اُذَرّ%20تُركِكْ%20لانجوِجزّ%20أَرْ%20نَتْ https://translate.google.com/#ar/en/أَرَبِكْ%20ازْ%20أَ%20سِ...
int_19h 10y ago
I don't really know enough about Turkic languages to say whether Latin is a better fit for them than Arabic, or not. I would expect modern Turkish alphabet to be better at it, if only because it was specifically designed for that purpose, and not just organically adopted the way Arabic was. But my point wasn't about which one is a better fit, but rather which one was historically used for that particular language first, and for the longest period of time, and used to produce the most past cultural artifacts. And in this case, it would be Arabic.

alnitak 10y ago

> Vowels are an afterthought to Arabic writing. Are you an Arabic speaker? This claim is a bit stretched. Yes, short vowels are written as diacritic symbols on consonants, which are often dropped from mass publications. However, long vowels are an essential part of the language and they are indeed present as their own letters in Arabic.

Koshkin 10y ago

But the Arabic alphabet is already being succesfully used in Iran and Pakistan, to give a couple of examples, for languages that are very different from Arabic.

gotchange 10y ago

> Vowels are an afterthought to Arabic writing, That's an orientalist claim. Vowels do exist in Arabic but some foreign learners of the language don't get the distinction between short and long vowels and how the letters "ا و ي" have dual role as consonants and vowels as well. > you're shoehorning a language into a script that really isn't appropriate for it. Here's a phonetic transliteration of your first sentence in Arabic "Arabic is a Semitic language; Turkish and the other Turkic are not." "أَرَبِك از أَ سِمِتِك لانجوِﭺ، تِركِش أَند أَذَر تِركِك أَر نَت" By the way, this is the Egyptian convention since the "g" sound is missing in Modern Standard Arabic.

mysterypie 10y ago
Great example! I had the misconception that Arabic had no vowels. I fed your Arabic transliteration into Google Translate[1], clicked on the "speak it" icon for the Arabic, and I could hear a comprehensible English sentence: https://translate.google.com/m/translate?hl=en#ar/en/أَرَبِك%20از%20أَ%20سِمِتِك%20لانجوِﭺ،%20تِركِش%20أَند%20أَذَر%20تِركِك%20أَر%20نَت%22 https://translate.google.com/m/translate?hl=en#ar/en/أَرَبِك... If Arabic had no vowel sounds then this should have been impossible! [1] Ignore the English translation which is meaningless and irrelevant. In this case I'm using Google Translate for speech synthesis, not for translation.
Mediterraneo10 10y ago
That vowels are an afterthought in Semitic scripts is not an “Orientalist claim” at all, it’s completely mainstream archaeology. The use of some consonant letters to denote long vowels (as so-called matres lectionis) was a development subsequent to the use of a purely consonantal writing system. With regard to Turkic, one of the challenges with using the Arabic script is not just that Turkic has a larger vowel inventory than Arabic or Persian, but the frontness/backness of vowels plays a major part in the morphophonemics. The Orkhon script that was the first used for Turkic languages was designed to reflect this, but when the Arabic script was introduced in towards the Middle Turkic era new strategies had to be thought up to reflect frontness/backness, e.g. the use of Arabic emphatic stops versus non-emphatic ones. However, the solutions that were found left a lot of room for ambiguity. I often read Kazan Tatar documents in the old Arabic script, and I can understand how the plethora of rules and exceptions confused the masses prior to the introduction of the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. (The Cyrillic script now in use is hardly better than the Arabic script, though)
- gotchange 10y ago
  This is how all alphabets came into being: 1- Egyptian hieroglyphs 2- Sinaic script 3- Phoenician script. Then alphabets evolved from that like Latin and Greek with all the bells and whistles. Semitic scripts on the other hand remained true to its roots and didn't evolve to have dedicated vowels early on. Arabic as a Semitic language descended from Syriac and Aramaic and thus lacked distinct vowels. Heck early Arabic script didn't make any effort to differentiate similar looking consonants as diacritic were totally missing. Case in point, Hejazi Script, one of the early Arabic scripts lacked vowels, vowel diacritics and consonant diacritics but only possessed the defining quality of cursive/adjoining writing. However, for later versions of the Arabic script, things improved substantially esp. when it had the full support and backup of the then-young and burgeoning Islamic state, and thus it underwent a complete overhaul where it got all the bells and whistles of other alphabets but retaining a few distinctive features like compactness. So, yeah you can say that vowels were afterthought in early Arabic scripts but definitely not for the current system in use for centuries now and that's why I characterized his/her statement as an orientalist claim that's completely inaccurate and improper. For Ottoman Turkish, I get the frustration that some Turkish speakers may have had with reading or writing in Arabic script. Original Arabic script is not supposed to be a drop-in replacement for any language. It needs first to be extended and re-purposed to meet the requirements of the target language and with languages like Turkish with a wider selection of vowels, it gets tricky to work around the limitations of the script like vowel diacritics. Absent these additions and workarounds, it becomes more advisable to make the switch to more accommodative script like Latin and forgo the succinctness and terseness gains of the Arabic script and that's why I view Kurdish written in Arabic script as a big mess as the developers opted to full hard code of the vowels in the script while dropping vowel diacritics altogether.
balnaphone 10y ago
The parent post has a "چ" or "cheem" character, which is neither Arabic nor required in this case. That character is used in Persian, Urdu, Pashto, etc., but not in Arabic. A more phonetic transliteration of "Arabic is a Semitic language, Turkish and the other Turkic languages are not" is: أَرَبِكْ ازْ أَ سِمِتِكْ لانجوِج، تِركِشْ أَندْ اُذَرّ تُركِكْ لانجوِجزّ أَرْ نَتْ which you can listen to a robot speak by visiting https://translate.google.com/#ar/en/أَرَبِكْ%20ازْ%20أَ%20سِمِتِكْ%20لانجوِج،%20تِركِشْ%20أَندْ%20اُذَرّ%20تُركِكْ%20لانجوِجزّ%20أَرْ%20نَتْ https://translate.google.com/#ar/en/أَرَبِكْ%20ازْ%20أَ%20سِ...

int_19h 10y ago

I don't really know enough about Turkic languages to say whether Latin is a better fit for them than Arabic, or not. I would expect modern Turkish alphabet to be better at it, if only because it was specifically designed for that purpose, and not just organically adopted the way Arabic was. But my point wasn't about which one is a better fit, but rather which one was historically used for that particular language first, and for the longest period of time, and used to produce the most past cultural artifacts. And in this case, it would be Arabic.