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Should Arabic-Speaking Nations Replace Arabic With Roman Letters?

Should Arabic-Speaking Nations Replace Arabic Script With Roman Letters?


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Changing the script of any language is extremely disruptive to the progress and development of the culture, of which that language is a component. It can alienate an entire class of people, and render them irrelevant. It can cut off people from their history. It can split a nation into two groups, one that embraces the new script, and one that holds on to the original script. It can do much damage.

Indonesia, Malaysia, and Turkey are good examples where people familiar with the old script are considered backward, while those embracing the new script are seen as educated and cultured. While Pakistan retained its language and script (Urdu), English did become the official language, and those who speak it are considered superior to those who don't.

Israel had the same debate 75 years ago about Hebrew vs Yiddish and/or German. Israel's leaders wanted to make the country more inclusive of the Sephardim (who spoke Ladino) and the Mizrahim (who spoke Arabic). I remember reading a funny story about the triumph of Modern Hebrew:

It was now or never to make a stand for the Hebrew language – either it would be established as the language of the nation or it would remain the language of a select few, dividing the nation and extending the exile...

Legend has it that his reigning moment came during a demonstration that ultra-Orthodox Jews had organized in Jerusalem to protest his work. Ben-Yehuda couldn’t have been happier – they were protesting in Hebrew. It was now conclusive. Hebrew would be the official language of the Jewish People in the Land of Israel.

The point is, yes, in the short run, the transition to the new language was difficult and divisive, but in the long run, it united the Jewish people like no one would have thought possible. The same holds true of the divisions within the Islamic world. I would argue that Romanization of modern Arabic would reduce class divisions, including between those who speak English and those who do not.

Ironically enough, many younger secularized Jews such as myself view other Jews with traditional educations who can understand both English and Hebrew but also Yiddish with great jealousy. And if you actually can understand Ladino, you're officially a badass. Funny how that works?
 
So how about replacing all Arab with some natives of California instead of replacing their language? that would be easier I think.
 
There are characters in Arabic for which there is no Latin equivalent. So either you will end up creating new characters or borrow from Turkish Latin script.

@Aestu why is Yiddish preferred over Hebrew amongst Jews outside Israel? Has there been ever talk of writing Hebrew in Latin script?

With sufficient motivation a person can learn any language. Why did the Turks not motivate their own people to learn their own script? Or was it Ata Turk's goal to drop the Ottoman baggage of Turkey and try to integrate it into Europe? How many Turks can read texts from the Ottoman era?
 
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Do Mexicans count?

Yes they do, unless they use letters you don't approve and trump doesn't build his wall .
Literacy rate in Saudi Arabia is 97% not because we use Latin scripts but because we use ours and we spend more on education. Iraq used to have a high literacy rate till one native of california has similar mentality you have got an insane idea to bring democracy to Iraq by tanks and bombs.
Didn't you notice that you have the same flawed mentality that rednecks have?
 
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Yes they do, unless they use letters you first approves and trump doesn't build his wall .
Literacy rate in Saudi Arabia is 97% not because we use Latin scripts but because we use ours and we spend more on education. Iraq used to have a high literacy rate till one native of california has similar mentality you have got an insane idea to bring democracy to Iraq by tanks and bombs. Didn't you notice that you have the same flawed mentality that rednecks have?

What California native are you referring to?
Bush II is very Texan. Californians and Texans generally resent each other's culture.
Cheney and Rumsfield were from the Midwest.
Podhoretz and Wolfowitz were from New York.

According to UNICEF, KSA's literacy rate is 87%. KSA can afford to urinate money at problems and its educational system has many of the same problems as the American educational system for the same reasons (but more so), so that wouldn't really work for Arabic-speaking countries that are not petrostates.

My point in the OP is that, sure, it's theoretically possible to spend unlimited money on building schools and having people with nothing better to do attend them, but it's probably not as efficient or effective as just doing what the countries that reformed their languages did.
 
What California native are you referring to?
Bush II is very Texan. Californians and Texans generally resent each other's culture.
Cheney and Rumsfield were from the Midwest.
Podhoretz and Wolfowitz were from New York.

According to UNICEF, KSA's literacy rate is 87%. KSA can afford to urinate money at problems and its educational system has many of the same problems as the American educational system for the same reasons (but more so), so that wouldn't really work for Arabic-speaking countries that are not petrostates.

My point in the OP is that, sure, it's theoretically possible to spend unlimited money on building schools and having people with nothing better to do attend them, but it's probably not as efficient or effective as just doing what the countries that reformed their languages did.

I still can't see your point. According to UNESCO, Jordan, which is not a petrostate, has literacy rate of 96.7%. They didn't change the script of Arabic but they spend more money on education.
 
I still can't see your point. According to UNESCO, Jordan, which is not a petrostate, has literacy rate of 96.7%. They didn't change the script of Arabic but they spend more money on education.

The point is that the evidence is that Roman script is easy enough to learn that it is possible to pick it up from reading the back of a cereal box, without ever actually attending school, and that Romanizing written Modern Arabic would therefore greatly facilitate mass literacy.

The truth is there is a very big difference between 96.7% and 99%. At 96.7%, you're still talking in terms of the existence of a class in society that is unable to read or write. At 99%, you're talking in terms of statistical entities like the mentally disabled or sampling/response errors, rather than "class illiteracy".

The same is true about problems like starvation and dysentery that don't exist as social problems in the West, but continue to live on as statistical problems. The difference isn't spending on medical care or what have you, but Westernization as a social force. Part of that social force is the rationalization of language that typically occurs in countries seeking to Westernize - Japan and Turkey being the relevant comparisons in this context.
 
My understanding regarding the modern Turkish alphabet was that it was not simply a change from Persian-Arabic script, but that the Latin alphabet was applied phonetically to spoken Turkish so it is actually more accurate and far easier to learn than it was under the old script. Perhaps a Turkish poster can verify that or point out where I am wrong.

I have to say though, Arabic or Persian script is certainly more beautiful than Latin script.

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You should tag @telkon ,he is our language expert.
 
Arabic calligraphy is interesting form of writing , the Islamic heritage loses something when changing to Roman Alphabets , English and roman letters are wonderful awesome form of expression for age of internet but the Calligraphic writing (arbic / urdu) has a unique way of expression

I just don't think certain things can be expressed with out the beautiful expression of calligraphy

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While I am Pakistani and obviously writing on Internet using English the best language for the Internet- however I still appreciate the Arabic text and form of expression

However every language has its beauty and uniqueness and its has to be appreciated by listening and speaking it

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Just was asking myself , my language Urdu has no word for what Japanese describe with 1 word , nor do I think Arabic has this word represented - But Japanese have 1 word that replaces 8 words representation (explanation)
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English has the ability to unite the meaning of all languages as a universal linker

But each language brings something unique a history of how text / alphabets and words evolved over time


Poverty in Muslims world is not due to not using Roman letters , but it is bad governance and lack of quality schools and jobs due to Dictatorship governments and over population.

Japan till last 100 years relied 100% on Japanese text for running its affairs of its country and it is 2nd economy of world, and having the highest literacy rate in world & clean cities


Beautiful hand writing in English , from 1800's
Most folks starting to write English with hand at some point must have tried to write fancy English , the skill is dieing due to invention of Computers and folks doing assignments in computer print outs
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Humans went from expressing themselves with paintings to writings so each text had its visionaries

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There are characters in Arabic for which there are no Latin equivalent. So either you will end up creating new characters or borrow from Turkish Latin script

Cool. I would say "use the Phonecian or Hebrew scripts because they're Semitic scripts that are phonetically similar but easier to read" but that would be much more offensive than using the Roman script and reassigning the pronunciation of some letters. Some Germanic and non-Cyrillic Slavic languages (e.g., Polish) had the same problem and solved it the same way.

@Aestu why is Yiddish preferred over Hebrew amongst Jews outside Israel? Has there been ever talk of writing Hebrew in Latin script?

Jewish tradition requires all male Jews to learn to read the Torah, which is, obviously, written in the Hebrew script. Therefore, all Jews were traditionally familiar with that script. Yiddish came into being as the script was used to write out the Low German spoken by Ashkenazim. Ladino and Aramaic/Judeo-Arabic came to exist in Sephardic and Mizrahi communities for the same reasons. So, the lingua franca of whatever countries Jews in the Diaspora were living in, were inevitably married to the Hebrew script - and it could never happen the other way around.

Israel is a melting-pot of Jewish ethnic groups that were completely discrete in the Diaspora, being as they were on different continents. The Mizrahim and Sephardim became effectively extinct outside Israel after the Jewish Nakba in the 1960s. Therefore, most Jews who still live in the Diaspora are Ashkenazim whose ethnic language is Yiddish.

Modern Hebrew is the lingua franca of Israel, in the same way English is the lingua franca of the US. So, Yiddish, by its very nature, is a household language, and fills the same role as English. Therefore, the only people who speak it as such, rather than English, are haredim (ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazim) who live in highly insular communities in the West. For Jews who are neither extremely traditional and insular haredim living in the West, nor sabras (Jews born in Israel), the role filled by Modern Hebrew is filled by English. Therefore, Diaspora Ashkenazim have no reason to speak Modern Hebrew growing up and must instead struggle to pick it up later. This is one of the strongest incentives for Jews to make aliyah and raise their children in Israel.

The US is one of a very few countries where violent antisemitism has never been a mainstream social force. Therefore, there has been a growing number of Jews who are not insular purely for its own sake and thus need not learn Yiddish (but also have a relative lack of incentive to develop more than a nominal knowledge of Biblical Hebrew either). On the other hand, Yiddish is perceived in increasingly romantic terms by latter-day Diaspora Ashkenazim and their pride in their ancestors' culture. Being able to speak it (which is very rare outside those communities) is therefore a significant mark of status and Jewish education.

Sorry for the wordy response. Does that answer your question, PNG?

With sufficient motivation a person can learn any language. Why did the Turks not motivate their own people to learn their own script? Or was it Ata Turks goal to drop the Ottoman baggage of Turkey and try to integrate it into Europe? How many Turks can read texts from the Ottoman era?

That's the trick there. Motivation. Rednecks are completely not "motivated" to learn to read - yet they do. It comes down to human nature and the social benefits of a script that is apparently leaps and bounds easier to learn regardless of "motivation."
 
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Sure arabic and similar scripts look nice, but this isnt the age of writing everything down in fanciful writing. Its the technology age, you need a fast and simple means to connect people worldwide with an easy to understand script instead of 1000 fancy ones.
 
orry for the wordy response. Does that answer your question, PNG
But my question was why was Yiddish not chosen as one of the official languages of Israel? Many of the early settlers in Israel were Yiddish speaking European Jews.

The point is that the evidence is that Roman script is easy enough to learn that it is possible to pick it up from reading the back of a cereal box,

Why would a person who does not read a cereal box in normal Arabic put in some effort to read it in Latinized Arabic?

Its the technology age, you need a fast and simple means to connect people worldwide with an easy to understand script instead of 1000 fancy ones.

Even in today the art of articulation and expressing oneself in words has not died. Try applying for a job with text message style spelling, punctuation and grammar.
 
Sure arabic and similar scripts look nice, but this isnt the age of writing everything down in fanciful writing. Its the technology age, you need a fast and simple means to connect people worldwide with an easy to understand script instead of 1000 fancy ones.
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