The Diversity of Arabic Scripts | Hacker News Reader

The Diversity of Arabic Scripts

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145 pointsdrdee53 comments

My favourite script has to be Square Kufic [0]. The pixel-like design is abstract and utterly gorgeous on architecture.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kufic#Square_Kufic

Yes, it is also close to versace square pattern fret or Greek pattern :"Greek key, also referred to as meander, is in its most basic form a linear pattern. The design is made up of a long, continuous line that repeatedly folds back on itself, mimicking the ancient Maeander River of Asia Minor with its many twists and turns. Homer mentions the river in “The Iliad,” and it is believed that the meander motif symbolizes infinity or the eternal flow of things. (In fact, the word “meander” is derived from the 250-mile-long snaking Maeander, known today as the Menderes, which flows through southwestern Turkey.) What is most astonishing about the meander motif is that it is found in the architecture, sculpture and decorative arts of many early civilizations — civilizations that could not possibly have known or seen one another’s artifacts. It seems that those cultures, independent of one another, created their own version of the motif.

I had an almost end of life experience and the final moment about to happen was accompanied by a feeling of euphoria and had a vanishing point the single path meander motif pattern was spiralling toward.

I’m also a fan of Kufic engraving, like on this 13th century astrolabe https://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/astrolabe/catalogue/backReport/Astr...

Square kufic is awesome, I used it to design my personal website's "logo" https://muattiyah.com/

What tools did you use to design that logo?

inkscape iirc :) At the time I wanted a tool that would typeset text I write into geometric kufic and have some parameters that one can tune to e.g. control curvature, colors, ...etc but it'd have been too big of a bikeshed.

Wow. Those patterns never clicked as writing to me. The Shahada example is so cool.

The information on the Kufic hafsids resembles the TLV patterning on bronze mirrors. Wonder if there is an information density measure per square area for these things. QR-codes have builtin information redundancy in case parts of the pattern deteriorate.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TLV_mirror

I love the aesthetic as well.

I’m curious, how readable is this to a native Arabic reader? Is it easy to read fluently or does it take some processing?

Square Kufic is easy to read for native readers when you add diacritical marks and keep the general order along a path. You'll often see words or phrases repeated or flipped to make cool geometric designs, which is easy to spot for native readers but often confusing for others.

The Reem Kufi font [0] is even easier to read and rather popular on trendy Arabic websites and publications.

[0] https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Reem+Kufi

I see that font a lot at arabic restaurants here in LA.

What is the relation between the square font and Reem Kufi?

The pixelated font is called square kufic. Kufic script in general is very angular as opposed to flowing, think monospace font vs cursive. You see this in classical mosaics as well as modern decorated buildings, having the straight/right-angle thing going on is either more complementary for being part of the architecture or is a material constraint of having square tile to work with or trying to make sure you're applying the text to the building in a way that is "plumb square".

So Reem Kufic is a modern font that has the same goal as the classical, square kind.

Not a native reader, using my acquired reading knolwdge. It takes a lot of processing for me, no idea where to start, had to look for each letter and still couldn't find a few. So great as a design, quite poor for readability.

Reading is like a solving a puzzle. Definitely not easy.

I have no idea what it says, I can tell it is arabic but no idea where to start reading

I'm a native reader, was never able to understand it

As a Non-Arabic the aesthetics looks like the colorscheme from Borland IDE's for DOS, such as Turbo Pascal and Turbo C.

As a non-Arabic-reader it looks really stylish to me - like on the Iraqi flag

That's no accident.

It's named for the city of Kufa in modern-day Iraq.

I was giving an example of one of the things I liked in particular. Text on a flag to me is usually a no-no but in Iraq’s case it works (and Iran’s too, but a bit more subtle). Sorry I should’ve been clearer :-)

Nasta`liq is a fabulous calligraphic style. Artists have perfected it and they sometimes make illustrations like [0]. This translates to: "I wish for such a dance in the center of the ring".

This is a second part of a verse from Rumi in Persian. The complete verse is: "Wine glass in one hand and sweetheart's hear in another .. I wish for such a dance in the center of the ring"

[0] https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/7248049389534044/

Beautiful script, but I don't think it should be used in print by default for any language.

I would not be surprised if Iran's use of a clearer script when teaching Farsi in the education system (and in public life and publishing in general) plays a significant role in the higher literacy rates in the country vs. Pakistan insisting on printing everything in the most unreadable nasta'aliq font.

As a Pakistani, I can assure you the usage of Nastaliq is very far down in the list of reasons why the literacy rate in Pakistan is so low.

Also I find Naksh unreadable. To the point where I use a browser extension to change fonts to Nastaliq. What you can read easily, really depends on what you were trained to read.

Nastaliq style is Urdu is written by hand. And due to me being a Urdu speaker, I find it the most beautiful.

Unfortunately, web fonts for Arabic-Persian-Urdu are typically in Naksh style, which are then used by Urdu websites. Personally, I find them unreadable because of my training in Nastaliq.

I can’t find this poem, can you give me another reference please?

https://lyricstranslate.com/en/benm%C4%81y-rokh-ke-b%C4%81gh...

I'm interested too, in particular because English translations of Persian poetry is sometimes closer to hallucination than translation. Admittedly it's a tough challenge though.

Interview with Nadine Chahine, a typographer who specializes in Arabic:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwIbkOs2LkI

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadine_Chahine

I am happy see Kazak included, even if it is at the very end. Some of these Central Asian languages which use a modified Arabic/Persian script keep getting overlooked by font foundries - there are some absolutely beautiful RTL fonts out there totally unusable for Kazak due to missing only 3-5 characters. Fortunately, UKIJ (http://www.ukij.org/fonts/) includes Kazak characters in their RTL fonts. Raxmet!

What always bugged me is most Westerners who put Arabic tattoos use the ugliest possible "typewriter" script, the one equivalent to Consolas for English, rather than any of the countless artistic ones.

I love Consolas, it is way better looking than other fixed fonts, including Courier.

Would you consider it a good choice for a tattoo font tho for non-tech folks?

I practice calligraphy as a hobby. I mostly do western hands with a square nib. I read Arabic and tried to pick it up but gave up. It was much harder than English especially without a teacher.

A famous Western Arabic calligrapher based in the States is Mohammed Zakariya https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Zakariya. Perhaps his most popular work is the Eid Mubarak postal stamp that you can see here https://store.usps.com/store/product/buy-stamps/eid-greeting...

Traditional way of studying Arabic calligraphy is extremely demanding. Probably one of the hardest arts to master. It is admirable that Mr. Zakariya passed the gauntlet

Once I was looking at the same word side by side in Arabic and Hebrew and I could imagine Hebrew letters being written in a flowing cursive and coming out as Arabic letters. The languages turned out to be surprisingly similar!

Those were most likely שלום and سلام. That is the word for peace in each language. Of course they are cognate, and they have the interesting property that the first and last letters are written similarly - this is not true for every Hebrew and Arabic letter (I speak both languages).

But what is _most_ interesting about this word in both scripts, in my opinion, is the middle two letters. In Arabic, when written alone, they do not look like the Hebrew letters. However, together they form a ligature that _does_ look like the two Hebrew letters. Even more interesting is that one of the letters is different between the languages (Vav in Hebrew, Alif in Arabic) however, the Hebrew Vav actually does look like the Arabic Alif: ו and ا. So this word is a combination of many properties, causing it to appear the same in both scripts.

Great insight!

I think I did it with a few different words, seeing both languages (not speaking much of either) often displayed side by side in public places in Israel. Maybe the similarity is only be between a few letters but that didn’t stop my imagination, having some background with Chinese brush calligraphy it’s all about how crazy the cursive gets… and hits are more memorable than misses, those م / ם and س / ש were definitely the highlights.

They should be similar. They are the two largest surviving Semitic languages left.

Indeed, Arabic is the most beautiful script in existence. (Imagine if the Spanish had adopted it in place of the Latin script.)

It's the contrast between the ascenders, descenders, and the x-height that make Arabic so lovely for me to see, even though I can't read it. Sudanese script is visually striking, though not traditionally pretty. It's the Mondrian to the Rembrandt of Arabic.

Aljamia existed at Al-Andalus times.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aljamia

Could you clarify if the statement you just made is your opinion or if there's a source you could share?

Georgian script is pretty nice too.

I’m quite fond of the Thai Lanna script visually: https://www.endangeredalphabets.net/alphabets/lanna-aka-tai-...

Why neither Arabic or Hebrew didn't accept vowels as the core of its script?

It's not very necessary when you take the structure of the languages into account. In most cases the vowels are predictable from the grammar[0]. Your question is a bit cart-before-horse, really - they have a writing system that is perfectly adequate for what is it used for, there is no evolutionary pressure for it to adapt to.

[0] In case you are not familiar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_root#Triconsonantal_ro...

Because these scripts were developed while societies transitioned from oral tradition to literacy. It's only modern literate language that brings with it an aura of exactitude. Oral tradition allows for more ambiguity and alternate interpretation, and arabic and hebrew developed in a way that suppored that expectation of flexibility and ambiguity through a triple of consonants having many possible meanings.

And? Castillian Spanish can be traced to vulgar Latin (almost) and then to Latin, yet we did changes on usability, grammar and spelling over centuries.

Being Arabic and Hebrew "inmutable" on vowels hinders the main reason for a language to exist, its main purpose: being able to be a proper tool to send a message between two or more peers.

There's no excuse to put vowels if you already set an standard, as the RAE did for Spanish five centuries ago.

Why doesn't English accept tones as the core of its script? :)

If any, English needs an orthografic reform.

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