4 ms·

I find it interesting that many variations of Kufic script, which as far as I know is the 'original' Arabic script, seem to be almost ideally suited for print/d

I find it interesting that many variations of Kufic script, which as far as I know is the 'original' Arabic script, seem to be almost ideally suited for print/digital reproduction. With the square normalized forms it almost looks like QR codes: https://www.google.com/search?q=kufic+script&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=kufic+script&tbm=isch This is in contrast to modern Arabic writing which seems to be geared to handwriting, with its flowing and connected shapes, kind of like old Latin cursive scripts.

616c 12y ago
Hardly optimal, to be honest. The QR code nature is because all diacritics are not used at all, period. Those dots actually signify, you guessed it, different letters (ironically, they are grouped into Arabic by articulation: b, t, and th are letters in Arabic, same shape and different dots; there order in the alphabet are grouped because you make them with the same part of your mouth). Problem with that is, grokking text is difficult without a lot of practice. I am not a native Arabic speaker, and reading that stuff, even if I can read novels, the Quran, and weird pre-Islamic poetry (vocab is very different) would take me days to decipher if written in that script. What is more funny is that there are not even short vowels in Kufic script. So after I learn to read and know contextually which letters are which, I would only know the consonants. And the vowels in Arabic are amazingly important (same consonant, different vowels = same word root, but meaning can change from book to dest to library to writer, for example), so Kufic is an easy way to bring an Arabic student to suicide.