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Comment by mxchelsemaan | Hacker News Reader

>As I understand, Arabic alphabet wasn't designed to be practical for daily use and only for writing sacred texts.

You clearly don't. Arabic was the premier language for philosophy, science, and mathematics in the middle ages. Algebra, algorithms, zero, cipher, average, and so on are all etymologically Arabic. One might start to suspect bigotry from a "Panzerschrek."

>Letters have similar form to each other, joints between them makes it harder to take them apart.

Your brain is not powerful enough to pattern-match, but your incapacity is not universal.

>It's objectively so horrible.

Literal billions in the world disagree. I might equally claim that the Arabic abjad is infinitely more beautiful than the pedestrian Latin alphabet, especially when expressed in the ugly and diseased Orc-tongue that is called German. [1] Your lack of taste is not universal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS_-7B1FAbE&pp=ygUaY2hpbmVzZ...

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> Arabic was the premier language for philosophy, science

But this was not for ordinary people (peasants) or even accountants, where practicality matters.

> Your brain is not powerful enough to pattern-match, but your incapacity is not universal

With some training it's possible to read Arabic texts. But this requires more mental load and practice compared to other alphabetical systems.

> Literal billions in the world disagree

Argumentum ad populum. There also billions of people using even worse writing systems - non-alphabetical ones. This doesn't mean that they are as good as alphabetical systems like latin.

The video you linked has nothing to do with practicality. It's about calligraphy, which is an art form. It may look good, but it doesn't matter for daily use when one needs to read and type a lot.

> But this was not for ordinary people (peasants) or even accountants, where practicality matters.

All peasant societies were illiterate, including Latin script adopters. Completely irrelevant to Arabic.

"Or even accountants" - apparently, Arabs didn't trade! It's not like Muhammad himself was, you know, a trader and an accountant...

> With some training it's possible to read Arabic texts. But this requires more mental load and practice compared to other alphabetical systems.

Perhaps your brain is too slow. I and many other bilinguals read Arabic even more quickly and efficiently than Latin-script languages. The words are terser and are read as units as opposed to the inefficient character-by-character Latin system. Speed-reading doesn't exist in Arabic because Arabic is already speedily read.

> It may look good, but it doesn't matter for daily use when one needs to read and type a lot.

You just said it was objectively horrible looking above. But consistency cannot be expected of a jumbled mind.

I wonder by which metric you measure these scripts. Clearly it can't be on pronounciation or information density. If "amount of letters" is your pick, then Latin might be "objectively" the best system - you'd just be using a very bad metric.

If you're going to unify all the worlds language into one script, then you'd better pick a good measure for that. If everyone on the world learns it, then it doesn't matter if there are 50 or even 100 different characters.You will have to capture _all_ of the nuances of the languages without blowing them out of proportion in size. Good luck with that.

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