alieteraz

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1.
by alieteraz 12y ago
Note the frowny face. He's a Pakistani. https://twitter.com/kamilwaheed/status/481792094135009280
2.
by alieteraz 12y ago
There are two issues. One is that some operating systems (ios) don't offer the full alphabet. As for those that do (Android/Windows), they don't offer the right script. Hope that helps.
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by alieteraz 12y ago
BTW. I published this piece in fall of last year. Long before it came on Hacker News, it had been passed around the Pakistani and Indian Twittersphere, and no one there was saying that we should let tech companies off the hook for not offer
4.
by alieteraz 12y ago
The "people of Pakistan" are not a monolith. So some of them want Arabization and some do not and some want Westernization and so forth. As for the ugliness of naskh, its not that naskh is ugly, its that the naskh based mutant on
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by alieteraz 12y ago
The Turkish "huzun" is a lot like saudade. You should compare Orhan Pamuk's treatment with Fernando Pessoa.
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by alieteraz 12y ago
Respectfully, you are ignoring European history where certain languages were pretty much exclusively rendered in certain "scripts." This was also the case -- and still kind of is -- in the subcontinent. Anshuman Pandey has an inte
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by alieteraz 12y ago
You write: "All of them come from Arabic (not just the letters, the scripts) as well, and as an Arabic speaker I find that attitude strange. I could be reading too much into it." I think that's where our disconnect lies and I
8.
by alieteraz 12y ago
You are correct about the history. Unfortunately the Abbasid empire came to an end in 1258 AD and Urdu wasn't even around then. I take your point that naskh has been wide-spread. And it is true that it is even in the Indian sub-contine
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by alieteraz 12y ago
Great point about German language. I have come across that again and again. And you're right, there ARE Urdu speaking youth now who are basically just as comfortable in naskh as they are in nastaliq, if not more so. This was a revelati
10.
by alieteraz 12y ago
Languages do evolve and die. English itself is changing all the time. Same goes for Urdu. The question here is whether the changes are organic or is there simple oversight going on. My view is that the problem is of oversight, and of disreg
11.
by alieteraz 12y ago
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but if Apple and Android make a nastaliq font part of the directory of fonts that go into their devices from the get go, there wouldn't be a problem. Such fonts have already been designed. The issue
12.
by alieteraz 12y ago
This is Ali Eteraz. Thank you for recognizing this piece. It was a lot of fun to write. I've actually been to a Ycombinator event. Twice I think. A couple of your alumnus managed to talk me into downloading stuff or getting on email li