Comment by wirrbel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wirrbel | Hacker News Reader

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its an interesting read and I acknowledge the intent to keep the traditional and authentic writing system for Urdu.

I have a few thoughts on this though. One would be the legibility. Of course I cannot judge legibility of writing systems I do not like, but it seems that nastaliq would be hardly readable on a lot of mobile devices and I wonder how difficult learning the ornate script is. I am talking about alphabetization here.

Next thing is: I am learning turkish and turkish is written in the roman alphabet. As far as I know, it was written in a arabic/persian script before which was then reformed to use the latin alphabet. As far as I can tell this is today really uncontroversial and using the latin alphabet is actually the more suitable alphabet for turkish and its rich vowel system that is really important for grammar and meaning. Again I cannot really say anything for Urdu, but knowing it is not arabic but afaik a language of the indo-european family I wonder if there are more reasons to use the lating alphabet than just availability of nataliq fonts and rendering engines.

As a side note I would add a few observations relating to the cultural/heritage aspects. In Germany, the "Fraktur" was used widely even at the beginning of the 20th century (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraktur ). Some authors, like Hermann Hesse refused that Antiqua fonts would be used for their writings until publishers convinced them that their works could just not be read by young folks. In a way, a lot of people argued against using non-gothic fonts, but in the end antiqua became quite standard. Nowadays we use the lating alphabet (and most people are not concious about that there ever was a switch).

A note about Fraktur: Even though the wiki article states that the main reason for its downfall was the Nazis forbidding it themselves, as a native German speaker I quite strongly feel it to be associated with Nazi culture - which immediately renders it impossible to use in any context, since you want to be as far from that as you can. Allergic reaction to anything resembling Nazi symbolism is quite strong in German speaking culture, even in Switzerland where it never took hold. So it seems to me that postmodernist culture is most responsible for the sudden downfall of that scripture.

I associate Fraktur with Karl May :-) (He died 1912, so he predated the Nazis.)

As a native German I rather feel it associated with the German Empire - probably also not a desirable association (read "Der Untertan" by Heinrich Mann (in English this book seems to be known under different names: "Man of Straw", "The Patrioteer", "The Loyal Subject")), but it has nothing to do with nazis.

I would say it just looks really old fashioned and outdated. But of course this is a matter of perception.

Great point about German language. I have come across that again and again. And you're right, there ARE Urdu speaking youth now who are basically just as comfortable in naskh as they are in nastaliq, if not more so. This was a revelation to me and it added a wrinkle to my thinking. But I go back to my point, that we can't fully adjudge if nastaliq is meant to die off until we make at least a good faith effort to get it onto the devices.

What makes me wonder is, I would have thought that the prospects of nastaliq are increasing with electronic devices (as opposed to old-school printing presses).

What I also observe is, that arab speakers sometimes write with the latin alphabet using characters like "3" do represent some missing phonemes. Urdu surely is not alone, and having a proper nastaliq rendering on all devices might not solve the bigger issue here.

Could you elaborate a bit on nastaliq and how/whether it does represent Urdu's phonemes properly? Are people considering Devangari as an alternative?

> But I go back to my point, that we can't fully adjudge if nastaliq is meant to die off until we make at least a good faith effort to get it onto the devices.

Is that really true, though? The reason writing styles, fonts, heck even languages are for myriad reasons, but the intersection of technology and change (I don't just mean modern technology, but even the invention of the printing press itself, shipping and cross-continent contact, modernisation over the past few centuries) seems to me to be the dominant reason why they disappear. Perhaps this is just another example of that.

Of course, you can make the argument that because of technology now, there is no reason for a writing style to die off, and I wouldn't disagree! The question remains, though, is that whether it's worth it outside of the digitization of languages for archive purposes, if it's not used widely as-is. It's certainly interesting to think about, thanks for posting!

Although Antiqua is used almost ubiquitously in Germany, Fraktur still has its proponents in Germany (mainly among older people). Just to give one reason, which I consider as pretty convincing: Fraktur has two different small s (long s and round s)

> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraktur_%28Schrift%29#mediaview...

while Antiqua only has one. Since in German combinations of st, sp are pronounced differently and in German words are concatenated by juxtaposition, this can lead to situations where writing a German word in Antiqua can make it non-unique: Consider the word "Wachstube". Written in Antiqua it can either mean "Wach[-]stube" (guardroom) or "Wachs[-]tube" (tube of wax). If you write this word in Fraktur, it is clear, what word is meant:

> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wachstube.svg

I only explained the situation for the small s. There are lots of other rules, too. For details see

> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraktursatz

You could still write Wachſtube and Wachstube. Long s (ſ) could be made available in any script, and the fact that it isn't maybe tells that it is not such a big problem.

There are additional rules for non-optional ligatures hinting the pronunciation which sometimes must be used and sometimes must not; see my post at

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7944134

Indeed your argument shows that long s and pronunciation-hinting ligatures are not strictly necessary. But neither are high-level languages for programming (you could code anything, say in C or assembler). Nevertheless most programmers prefer using higher-level languages over C or assembler, because they implement desirable features. So why not use a writing system which already implements such nice features by construction?

The cló Gaelach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaelic_type had a similar history.

Minor nitpick: fraktur is not an alphabet, it is a style that some fonts exhibit. So "nowadays we use the latin alphabet" is not a change.

This is not true: Fraktur has two small s (long s and round s)

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7944021

and some ligatures that in German word have to be used or not depending on whether the letters of the signature seperate syllables or not.

Consider the German words "Tatzeit" (time of the crime) and "Tatze" (paw). For Tatzeit you must not use an tz ligature since the z is the beginning of a new syllable. On the other hand for "Tatze" you have to use the tz ligature.

So the Fraktur ligatures carry a meaning on the pronunciation of the German words that is lost when writing them in Antiqua.

Nitpick on the nitpick: You could not take a German text and change the font type to get proper Fraktur typesetting. It involves using some different rules (final s and inner "s"), ligatures that are context sensitive as well as different punctuation and font "markup" (no bold font but Sperrsatz, etc.).

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