The Turkish language was ancient and was written in the Arabic script for
a comparatively short time, and continuous efforts were always under way
to keep the language "pure". The Russian attempt was also aimed at the
Uralo-Altay family of languages, of which Turkish is the most dominant.
All these languages have had two or more than two different scripts in
recent history, i.e. the pre-historic scripts did not survive.
Arabic and Hebrew are purely alphabetic languages with scripts that have
been around since pre-history. Also the root-structure and
multi-dimensional grammar of Arabic is tightly related to its alphabet.
Last, but not the least, Hebrew and Arabic are languages of major world
religions, with huge emotional investments. Arabic scripts are the
official languages of more than 20 countries, and very sophisticated
typographical applications have been developed, especially for Urdu. 100%
of calligraphic printing of newspapers and books in Urdu is done on
computers, which starts with alphabetic typing on a keyboard.
Historically, the corpus of the world's knowledge went from Greek to
Arabic to Latin to modern European languages.
Hence, IMHO it is a moot point to advocate the forced extinction of
scripts rather than to develop code or strategy. It would be akin to
saying that due to irregular grammar and ambiguous spelling that depend on
context, English should not be considered for voice recognition software -
for which Arabic, with its distinct sounds and rule-based grammar is much
more appropriate.
A computer is a tool - not an enforcer of script and culture, and
electrons spin in both directions! And just to show its beautiful
sense of symmetery, nature does produce left-handed people. And the
speakers and readers of these languages represent about 30% of the world
population. It is sad that this problem has not been taken care of yet,
but it is high time.
Regards,
A
On Tue, 12 Feb 2002, Markus Kuhn wrote:
> > What you cannot automate, however, is the people reading those texts. It
> > is also impossible to reprint all the existing texts (consider that the
> > bible will have to written in original hebrew, for instance). As I said:
> > you are not the first to suggest this.
>
> It's certainly difficult, but not impossible. Turkey is the major
> successful case I know of, where a script reform has succeeded. It was
> driven by a major political move to make the country overall more
> secular and compatible with Europe. German's abandoning of fraktur
> probabaly doesn't count, as that's really just a different font style,
> not a fundamentally differently structed alphabet or reading direction.
> Does anyone know of any other examples or successful major script
> reforms (apart from the semi-successful Soviet attempts to force all
> their republics to switch to cyrillic)?
>
> Markus
>
>
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