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Efforts to reform Arabic script made more sense decades ago when illiteracy was high. But once the internet came along, the young people across the Arabic-speak
by TFNA 1mo ago
Efforts to reform Arabic script made more sense decades ago when illiteracy was high. But once the internet came along, the young people across the Arabic-speaking world who might have once been illiterate, took to literacy very keenly: you had to be at least at little literate to SMS with friends, access internet porn, and get sweet dopamine hits on social media. Suddenly Arabic script turned out not to be that big of a problem after all.
- pseingatl 1mo agoThose same teens came up with Arabizi so they could text. It consists of the Roman alphabet plus the numbers 3,5,7 and 9. It's written left to right and was created for texting on feature phones. Everyone can read it in any Arabic-speaking country. Given that so little is published in Arabic, a change to this grassroots script is long overdue.
- leviathan 1mo agoI still maintain to this day that the original usable numbers were 2, 3, and 7. All that 5 and 6 and 9 crap is useless and those letter were and could be done with normal latin letters: 5 already has kh, 6 already has t, 9 already has d, don't know what people used for غ but you can write it with gh
- eddythompson80 1mo agoWhen I used to communicate in Arabiz I would rarely use 5, 6 or 9 too, but I get why they are there. The problem with 6 and 9 is that there are 2 very unrelated sounds for t and d in Arabic. Mixing them is a hallmark of non-native speakers tell signs and to an Arabic speaker’s ear sounds broken. It’s like when German speakers mix th and z sounds in English. It’s very jarring to the ear and requires you to parse the same word you’re reading twice in your mind to tell whether it was 6 or t (or 9 or d) especially that very similar words might exist like 6atreb and tarteb or trab and 6arb. I usually don’t use 6 and 9 either except when I want to emphasis the 6 or 9 sound in a word. Kh and gh are problematic mainly because you’re relying on the special rule in Arabic that you can’t have 2 constants like k, g and h sounds after one another in a word. You’re relying on the wrongness of a kh or gh construct in Arabic to realize they must be standing for something else. I prefer them tbh, but I get the desire of some to have symbols for them. غ Is sometimes 3’ but I have seen more gh than 3’ especially that 3’ mixes the academic romanization with the “Arabiz” romanization
- leviathan 1mo agoMy village's name is خنشارة - written in latin as Khenchara. There's precedent for this for kh, so it carries easily to gh as well. My last name starts with a ق and in latin it's written with a K. The tools were just to provide a way to write letters that do not have a corresponding letter in latin alphabet, it's not a way to provide all the nuances of pronunciation.
- senadir 1mo agoCrazy to say that 9 is a d when it's clearly a قـ not a د Could be a regional thing because in north africa it's not a d
- Cyph0n 1mo agoThey’re saying it is ض, which is a letter us North Africans generally struggle to differentiate from ظ :) Also, afaik 9 is a ص in many countries, while 8 is a ق. But it is definitely my first time hearing of a 9 used as ض.
- delichon 1mo ago> Given that so little is published in Arabic, Rate of published words per person per language is a fascinating stat. I did a quick estimate and got Icelandic first, Mandarin last, with Arabic between Russian and Spanish.