From Afrikaans, Swahili and a host of other languages in Africa to Chinese, Hindustani, Indonesian and others in Asia, there was a time when Arabic characters ruled the day. Even some European languages including Bosnian and perhaps Russian were once written in an Arabic based script. So bad that it's no longer true.
I wonder what it would be like if from Indonesia to Central Asia and Africa, Arabic characters were still popular. They were used in many countries for almost half a millennium and then, there was a sudden switch to a Latin based script in the 20th century.
No, I don't hate the Roman characters. I merely wonder how different the world would have been if only...
Anyway, let's stop imaging an alternative history and read this:
I haven't created an alternative, Arabic character based script for Chinese. It already exists and some, unfortunately their number is declining, use it in China. It's called Xiao'erjing.
This is something damn interesting, isn't it?
The problem with Arabic characters is that they do not obligatorily indicate short vowels, and when yes, "e" & "o" & others are not written. Thus, it is unpractical except for Arabic itself. I think that Parsi would be far more popular if it were written in Latin fonts.
ReplyDeleteI believe it's only a matter of getting used to something.
DeleteAs to the short vowels, they are always there but custom has it that very few (I have yet to meet one) use them. Much of the time pronunciation is clear from the context and there are thousands of other clues.
I have yet to meet a person who pronounces مرد (MRD) like 'murd' or 'mird' or 'mirid' or 'marad' or 'murud' or 'mirud'.... they all know it's 'mard' (man). ;)
If you don't want to leave a space for ambiguity, like they do in case of Qu'ran, you can always use short vowels and what I have noticed in Xiao'erjing is that they use short vowels a lot! :)
Tre interese dankon por la artikolo!
DeleteWell Arabic doesn't have to omit vowels but often it does in imitation of Classical Arabic. Here it's mandatory, too many vowels. Imagine if Hawaiian used Arabic script? XD
The thing with Xiaoerjing is, it's special and unique in that ALL vowels need to be written (and they are, if you look at any historic or modern Xiaoerjing document), they have these vowels written. On the other side of spectrum is alphabets such as Uyghur and Kazakh, where there is no such vowels. These writing systems have created that work as vowels. Also ... for Hawaiian .... ummm .... i'd steer clear of Arabic. I would say most suitable for Hawaiian is Canadian Syllabic writing system.
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