Comment by gotchange | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gotchange | Hacker News Reader

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> It didn’t get all the bells and whistles of other alphabets in actual practice.

Like what exactly? What's missing of value?

> but this was rarely done in Arabic

Because it's redundant. I know it's frustrating for beginners to guess the diacritics on the words but once you get to intermediate/advanced proficiency level of the language, you'll start to appreciate this design aspect of the language.

> Again, the “current system” in use for centuries in Middle Turkic and early modern Kazan Tatar and other Kipchak languages did not mark most vowels with the use of diacritics in spite of their theoretic availability.

How's this Arabic's fault?

To be honest with you, I am not really familiar with Ottoman Turkish let alone other Turkic languages and their evolution journey but if they didn't make any use of extended vowel diacritics or worse the baseline package of Arabic, I don't know exactly how they managed to communicate using that system.

> Because it's redundant.

While short vowel markings are left out, as long as different words can have wildly different voicings, it is hard to claim they are redundant. Rather, the reader is simply pressed to tell the vowel pointing from context, a skill that does not come without considerably more literacy education than for alphabet writing systems. The claim that diacritics are redundant would be more easily defended for languages like Romanian where the sounds distinguished by diacritics still usually stand in an allophonic relationship dependent on the word’s morphophonemics, but that is certainly not the case in Semitic languages today.

> How's this Arabic's fault?

The Turkic script wasn’t introduced to the Turks in a vacuum. It was brought in as part of a larger influence of Islamic culture, and because among Arabic and Persian speakers the script was almost always used without short vowel diacritics, the Turks inherited the same “right way” of doing things, disastrous as it was for literacy in their languages until the early 20th century.

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