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There are some differences in the way the way the characters are laid out in English too, unless you use a monospace font.
by hessenwolf 15y ago
There are some differences in the way the way the characters are laid out in English too, unless you use a monospace font.
- burgerbrain 15y agoThose differences are not to my knowledge as a native English speaker used to convey any sort of meaning, and as demonstrated by the existence of monospaced fonts have no particular importance. They are merely an artifact of the glyph geometry.
- blacksmith_tb 15y agoThey don't convey any sort of meaning in Arabic either - letters just change their shapes depending on where they occur in a word. Cursive English handwriting does the same thing, to a lesser degree, and for the same reasons.
- roel_v 15y agoLike where? In cursive, at best what changes is that some ending curse goes up or down a bit more. The existence of cursive computer fonts shows that even in cursive writing, the shape of letters can be the same across a text. Minor changes are caused by the speed of writing the cursive. On the contrary, and as I understand it, in Arabic there are rules on how to change the shape of letters in certain contexts. In Arabic it's part of the writing system, in Western European languages it's not.
- hessenwolf 15y agoI give you Typographic Ligature: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_ligature http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_ligature
- roel_v 15y agoExactly, ligatures don't have any grammatical meaning. They're merely that - 'typographic'.
- hessenwolf 15y agoAnd the Arabic letters don't have any grammatical meaning. They are also merely typographic. I think we are saying the same thing here.