This problem is not limited to Arabic. Variants of the arabic alphabet are used by Persian (including Iranian and Dari dialects), Mazanderani, Qashqai, Luri, Gilaki, Kurdish (excluding Kurds in Turkey), Talysh, Azerbaijani (in Iran), Pamir languages, Pashto, Urdu, Balochi, Sindhi (in Pakistan), Punjabi (in Pakistan), Uzbek (in Afghanistan), Turkmen (in Afghanistan), Saraiki, Hindko, Brahui, languages spoken in Kashmir.
Whole languages are dying out because people are unable to express them properly on computers. Even popular software that dominate these speakers does not care to improve their experience. For example, Urdu has traditionally been written in the Nastaliq form [1], but is usually is rendered everywhere in the Naskh form [2]. There is no way to change this, for example, in Android without basically rooting it and changing the system fonts.
I feel like I've never gotten a compelling explanation for why Nastaliq is hard/unavailable. I'm not an expert on abjads, but it doesn't look harder to render then Naskh (and it self-evidently is possible since the fonts exist). Does anyone here know why they make it difficult? Urdu is much less obscure than, say, Sharada or other languages with Unicode support. I think Punjabi is also often written in Nastaliq when it's not in Gurmukhi or Roman.
In Naskh, each letter has only four forms (for the most part — there are a few ligatures etc. but I think ‘only four forms’ remains basically true). The choice between forms is determined almost entirely by position within a word (initial/medial/final/isolated). All the letters are aligned along the baseline and connect to each other in basically the same way.
By contrast Nastaliq is a much more complicated style. Many letters and letter combinations take on several different forms depending on which other letters surround them. Letter joins are usually diagonal, so letters earlier in a word need to be shifted above the baseline by a variable amount. Having to shift letters vertically as well as horizontally greatly complicates other aspects of the style too.
(I recall seeing a nice table some time ago showing all the various different possibilities for letter joins in Nastaliq. Unfortunately I can’t seem to find it again. Still, you might get some idea by consulting the documentation of one of the existing Nastaliq fonts, e.g. Awami Nastaliq: https://software.sil.org/awami/what-is-special/)
Yeah, but the difficulty isn't in rendering the fonts, it's for the font creator. So once the font is ready with all the combinations it rendering and using a Nastaliq font doesn't differ with rendering a Naskh. Nastaliq fonts are available in Persian, not sure if true for other languages, but it's just more complexity on making the font. For using a ready font the only thing needed is permission to change the font.
afaik this is a non-issue with modern text rendering engines.
Modern font files include rulesets to determine the forms and shaping engines apply these rules to eventually reach the desired "shape" (i.e. order, position and which glyphs to render).
For example, if you use HarfBuzz it should be able to calculate the Glyphs and offsets you need for a properly set script.
I personally spent way to much time trying to understand it, but at least according to this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaA0v0V4RsU) it really is not that difficult if you leave out all the font-selection and emoji shenanigans.
I think at least FreeType (glyph rendering) and HarfBuzz (text shaping) make it needlessly complex through their documentation.
It is extensive in describing what the parts do, but the only way to figure out what you need is by fiddling around. As soon as you want to do more complex stuff you're on your own. Especially figuring out which parts you don't need is annoying.
Nastaliq fonts already exist and used whenever possible. Yes, rendering a Nastaliq font takes marginally more compute. But in a world of electron apps which have a 10-100 times slower UX than they could be, saving compute is not an argument.
There are many high quality Nastaliq fonts available. You can install them on your computer and use them easily in whatever software (example office apps) allows you to set the font.
There are no technical reasons preventing the use of Nastaliq fonts everywhere. Only product design decisions by big tech.
My guess would be line height is a challenge and Naskh already exists. Then probably because these scripts are not used often in the places that are centers of software/OS development.
I don’t know either, but I am aware that in glyph based languages (and this article makes the case that Arabic has some glyph-like features), there is considerable social discussion about the equivalents, like pinyin. Detractors worry that sound-based (where sounds are based on the latin / western orthography) approaches to writing change something fundamental in people’s brains as distinct from more native versions.
In Chinese for instance, you can use a keyboard that combines radicals - parts of a character, or you can use a keyboard that combines phonemes. Those seem likely to change literally how you think in your language. There may be related concerns for Arabic.
That said, one of the complaints in the blog is that two different codepoints render to the same exact letter / phrase / word — this is not a problem unique to Arabic in Unicode, and there are known approaches: I’d expect (I’m not a Unicode expert by any means) that more work on the tech stack for rectification (I’m sure there’s a technical Unicode word for this process of matching codepoints for e.g. search and uniqueness of rendering) would likely be useful for Arabic, and relatively seamlessly flow in many places.
> I’m sure there’s a technical Unicode word for this process of matching codepoints for e.g. search and uniqueness of rendering
That’d be Unicode Normalization. I don’t have an opinion on the best source for more details, so here’s a link from unicode.org https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr15/
I don’t know enough to know whether or not there are still Arabic-specific issues, either in the spec or the implementations.
The example in the article of copy/paste/search is interesting. I think it’s equally likely to be a RtL issue as a normalization bug, but I haven’t done anything significant with either topic.
I would push back about Arabic being glyph based, it's a phoneme rendered beautifully on paper. a modified latin script could faithfully reproduce it semantically except that readers won't be able to stop and smell the roses. Arguably, once someone is accustomed to reading a script, they don't think or care about the aesthetics much, and if they did, that's a bad property for information density anyways
I looked at Arabizi and the numbers are really annoying for formal text etc. Finglish is better in my opinion, however it causes problems like being able to read the same text in two ways. like "dar". The a can be like 'a' in 'dad' or it can be 'a' like in 'car'. with different pronunciation it means 'door' and 'gallow' which can be very annoying in Arabic languages that unlike Persian write _ُ_ِ_ٌ_ً_ٍ_ّ_. Instead of numbers it uses combinations like 'kh' for 'خ', 'gh' for 'ق' and 'غ'. In some methods they use 'aa' for 'a' sound like 'bar' and single 'a' for 'a' sound like 'lad'.
Probably because it's a work around and not what most people want to do. Imagine someone telling you you have to type English in Cyrillic. I know if I could no longer type out Chinese characters and had to use pinyin it would feel very odd and like something was taken away.
For a while, Arabizi was wildly popular and universally used on feature phones. When mobiles became smarter, it was used less. Japanese has romaji and Mandarin has pinyin. Arabic's Arabizi would increase literacy rates and solve all these digital problems.
Romanization is a separate issue to using fixed glyphs.
There was a theory in the XIX / early XX century that full literacy was impossible without the Latin script but such claims are ridiculous especially for Arabic which is an alphabetic script already. China has higher literacy rates than Vietnam, for example.
I don't think the many composition rules of Unicode are really necessary, though. Maybe as an extension for academic work or artistic compositions but not for computing.
If all we had were movable types, all of these language users would find a way to write their language that wouldn't require a Turing-complete computer on each glyph. Now the Unicode gods pander to some of these computer-hostile scripts making the users of different scripts feel slighted.
The vast majority of Japanese and Mandarin speakers are also not in favour of replacing their current writing systems (which give them a link to thousands of years of their own history) in favour of simplified systems. I suspect it is the same for Arabic speakers.
I generally agree with what you're saying, but there is rather famously a simplified form of chinese that was designed specifically to increase literacy rates.
Japanese also underwent simplification post-WW2, but there is important context here.
In both cases, the original plan was for Chinese characters to fall out of use entirely via gradual simplifications, but in both cases the simplifications stopped soon after the first planned stages and it seems very unlikely it would be a popular initiative at this stage. Basically what happened in both cases was the equivalent of a spelling reform, not the elimination of a writing system.
In the case of Japanese, it seems there is some regret around simplification because characters not in the 常用漢字表 do not have the component simplifications applied that the standardised characters do (for instance, 攪拌 is more commonly used than 撹拌 despite the 覚 component being the "modern" simplified form -- and there are characters with no simplified form like the first character in 艱難, first character in 辻褄, or 迄).
Romaji/pinyin are widely used for typing the actual written scripts. They're not seen as alternate written scripts outside of edge case scenarios(like chats in FPS)
But consider how cursive is dying out in (at least American) English, and how many centuries of writing will become unintelligible to the casual reader as a result.
All of these important cultural artifacts require maintenance.
> All of these important cultural artifacts require maintenance.
This. Arabic users can complain about eg. Unicode not covering their writing in a suitable manner. And I (as a non-Arabic) can certainly see the problems described in the article.
But -going back to earlier days of computing- what stopped Arabic countries from devising a system that does that better than Unicode? (and covers other written languages like Hangul, Japanese or traditional Chinese, better than Unicode covers them)
Seems like that didn't happen? Either too few Arabic people cared, or solution(s) they came up with had shortcomings of their own & weren't implemented widely enough, or Unicode was good enough that few Arabic developers cared to go beyond that.
It's likely the same problem as in Pakistan. Due to the history of colonialism/control by European powers, in these countries personal economic success is usually tied to command of English or French. So even within each of these countries, the rich, educated and those in power prefer latin script. Consequently, there was never any strong push to develop computing technology for local languages.
The other reason is that it's not technologically simple to solve all the issues highlighted in the TFA. Unicode actually does a pretty decent job of setting a uniform standard, but a lot of software has to be written on top of it to get the entire system working: (1) your software must support bidi text, (2) good fonts must be available to display the text in multiple languages (3) textual data needs to be properly stored in unicode and transmitted as is at every point in the OS (4) search engines must deal with the complications of non-breaking spaces and legacy unicode characters.
You have to kind of rewrite the entire stack from top to bottom. Preferential Arabic/Persian/Urdu speakers never had the technical skills and the political power to drive those changes in software largely written in different continents.
Not only writing and printing is hard, so is selection and moving your cursor. Because in most tools, the right and left arrow keys don't mean right and left in Arabic, Persian etc. It's reversed in RTL languages, so right arrow moves the cursor to end direction (left in LTR, right in RTL) and left arrow moves you towards start direction (right in LTR, left in RTL). So in bidirectional text, for example when majority of the text is English and you have a short RTL phrase, you are holding right arrow and then then when you reach the RTL part the cursor suddenly jumps to the start of RTL text, then it goes to left and it SEEMS like you are going backward to the start, not forward. That is until you reach the end of RTL phrase and you teleport to start of next LTR part.
For a while, Arabizi was wildly popular and universally used on feature phones. When mobiles became smarter, it was used less. Japanese has romaji and Mandarin has pinyin. Arabic's Arabizi would increase literacy rates and solve all these digital problems.
Many Arabic-speaking countries already have very high literacy rates. Meanwhile Somali is a related language officially written in the Latin alphabet, but Somalia has a literacy rate around 50%: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cross-country-literacy-ra...
So adopting Arabizi without increasing access to education can be expected to do roughly nothing for literacy, whereas with a good education system, people can learn to read and write in Arabic script just fine.
The fact that the article was able to show correct version in regular text is pretty good indicator that if done correctly those are more or less solved problems. I don't disagree that there are probably plenty of times when those mistakes are repeated and solutions not used widely enough (more often for Arabic scripts than other languages), but even for 2017 it feels more like anecdotal examples of what can go wrong ignoring existing technical details. But those mistakes largely come down to having someone who cares and understands the language and technology not for the lack of solutions. There are probably plenty of interesting edge cases that might not be handled perfectly even though solutions for basic cases exist, but article doesn't come even close to discussing those technical details especially if it's only conclusion is "computers introduced more problems, notably because of Unicode".
> The inflexibility persisted and has arguably only become more aggravated in the 20th century
What about 21th century? Digital printing can overlap characters just fine. And modern fonts support context sensitive ligatures and glyph substitutions.
Second/third example those seemed to be caused by more by someone who doesn't understand the language copy pasting stuff.
PDF -> that's just PDF being bad. Text and text search in PDFs tends to mes up even or English.
> with unicode number U+0623, but one can also type أ, which is an alif and a high hamza, represented by unicode numbers U+0627 and U+0654.
That's what Unicode normalization and locale settings are for. Same thing applies to large fraction of latin based scripts other than English, anything which has letters with diacritic marks.
> for كثيره and كثيرة will in most cases yield different results
Similar thing in almost any non English language for example cafe and café or ABC and ⒶⒷⒸ. Although at least some systems handle it reasonably. Not sure how much it is heuristics based on large data (hard to scale across software), and how much it's good application of Unicode character decomposition/normal form tables. Which Arabic letters lack appropriate Unicode decomposition (and other) tables and what are the best practices of unicode normalization/decomposition/locale handling for search (applicable for all languages) are more interesting and actionable topics.
> Not even the simple idea of CJK has been implemented.
Many users of CJK language would argue that CJK unification was a mistake. If different languages prefer different forms of the glyph, they should better be separate characters. Having separate Chinese and Japanese fonts because CJK unified too much just introduces additional points of failure.
> Many users of CJK language would argue that CJK unification was a mistake.
Luckily it's not a decision without turning back. In most relevant contexts you should know the input language and can select a Font specifically using said variations. Of course this information will not be present in plain text, but if it turns out to become an issue I'd wager, since language codes do exist, that a control code-point for language selection can be added to the specification. There's already so many special cases in Unicode that it shouldn't be a huge issue (apart from backwards-incompatibility that would lead to tofu instead of no rendered glyph).
Hmm. by kashida do you mean something like 'ایـــــــــــــن'?
I don't think you mean this, because I don't know how would you do it in CSS. Looks more like a problem to be solved with different types of character than styling.
Almost as if the fonts, rendering systems and that all has a vanishingly low percentage of Arabic native-speakers. Why is left as an exercise for the reader.
It's... interesting how the author sees Han Unification as a feature, when it's just a longstanding and politically charged bug. CJK languages are mutually unintelligible, so displaying CJK texts in wrong fonts won't do anything meaningful; it won't make texts in one language readable to speakers of other languages.
Indeed displaying CJK texts in wrong fonts won't do anything to change the meaning and people who can read it in one font can read it in any font. They might complain that it looks ugly because that one stroke should be slightly longer and have a different angle, but those are ultimately aesthetic preferences that don't affect readability.
Even before Unicode, it was established practice that documents mixing Chinese and Japanese would use the same encoding for both and roughly nobody would bother to pick an ugly font for the foreign-language text to make it look appropriately different.
Unicode rightly decided that the fine details of appearance are left to fonts. Otherwise you'd also need e.g. a bunch of extra codepoints so that early-20th-century handwritten letters in German can have their look accurately preserved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BCtterlin
You can't mix encodings in a single file. A file has one encoding only. It was not possible before Unicode to mix two languages in a single file, whether the languages involved were Chinese or Japanese or French(English was an exception).
Now, if a file was encoded in Unicode, and/or if it was in such document format that support inline font specification, such as HTML, then you could mix two languages without having to stick to one language by e.g. wrapping <font face=Helvetica>paragraphs and words</font> <font face=Futura>with tags</font>.
My point is, it seems that the author is not aware that each of CJK languages are only understood within each countries, in both writings and speeches, and that's somewhat peculiar.
You may not be able to mix encodings, but mixing languages has always been possible.
If you used a French encoding you would be able to write in English, but not the other way around. I'd wager there are similar cases for cyrillic text.
What Unicode gave us is its universality (heh). You don't have to carefully select an encoding able to represent the languages you wish to use anymore.
Why do people still use this horrible-looking and hard to process alphabet? Why not switching to latin (as some countries did) or at least to reform it so that it's easier to type and to read?
Because pretty much no language besides Latin actually maps nicely to the Latin script. Pretty much all languages use digraphs, diacritic symbols or completely new letters in the Latin script (even English, œ and æ, for some time at least).
Having latin alphabet with diacritics and digraphs is still better than something like Arabic. Some non-latin alphabet with letters separate from each other (like Greek, Cyrillic, Armenian, Georgian, etc.) would be fine too.
It's objectively so horrible. Letters have similar form to each other, joints between them makes it harder to take them apart. As I understand, Arabic alphabet wasn't designed to be practical for daily use and only for writing sacred texts.
If you think Arabic horrible because it has connected letters, so is cursive. But I like both cursive and Arabic. You can easily distinguish separate words as the words' letters are connected, and you don't have to put less space to show that some letters are making a word. It's not optimized for printing and digital fonts I agree. But you can't say it's not useful for daily use. It's so much easier on paper.
>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.
> 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.
How can you describe something as “objectively” horrible-looking? Your opinion on the way that something looks is precisely that: an opinion. I’d add that neither the Arabic nor Latin alphabets were designed for anything. They both evolved organically from other previous alphabets.
I didn't read my comment properly. I have written, why Arabic alphabet is horrible. It's all cursive and letters aren't different enough from each other.
> I’d add that neither the Arabic nor Latin alphabets were designed for anything. They both evolved organically from other previous alphabets.
Many alphabets evolved from a need for daily stuff like accounting, where practicality matters. Arabs didn't have widespread alphabet until they needed writing their sacred texts, so, they have invented an alphabet primary designed for that. Other alphabetical systems were already widespread in the regions currently dominated by the Arabic alphabet and many of them look much better.
> Arabs didn't have widespread alphabet until they needed writing their sacred text
Many tens of thousands of pre-Islamic inscriptions made by Arabs are known. Arabs had been writing for centuries before the Quran, and the current Arabic script is just an iteration of earlier scripts. You might want to educate yourself.
This problem is not limited to Arabic. Variants of the arabic alphabet are used by Persian (including Iranian and Dari dialects), Mazanderani, Qashqai, Luri, Gilaki, Kurdish (excluding Kurds in Turkey), Talysh, Azerbaijani (in Iran), Pamir languages, Pashto, Urdu, Balochi, Sindhi (in Pakistan), Punjabi (in Pakistan), Uzbek (in Afghanistan), Turkmen (in Afghanistan), Saraiki, Hindko, Brahui, languages spoken in Kashmir.
Whole languages are dying out because people are unable to express them properly on computers. Even popular software that dominate these speakers does not care to improve their experience. For example, Urdu has traditionally been written in the Nastaliq form [1], but is usually is rendered everywhere in the Naskh form [2]. There is no way to change this, for example, in Android without basically rooting it and changing the system fonts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nastaliq
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naskh_(script)
> There is no way to change this, for example, in Android without basically rooting it and changing the system fonts.
I am really surprised Android won't let the user select their own system font. This is a huge accessibility problem, especially for dyslexics.
You can do it on some vendors' versions, sometimes requiring third party apps like zfont.
I feel like I've never gotten a compelling explanation for why Nastaliq is hard/unavailable. I'm not an expert on abjads, but it doesn't look harder to render then Naskh (and it self-evidently is possible since the fonts exist). Does anyone here know why they make it difficult? Urdu is much less obscure than, say, Sharada or other languages with Unicode support. I think Punjabi is also often written in Nastaliq when it's not in Gurmukhi or Roman.
In Naskh, each letter has only four forms (for the most part — there are a few ligatures etc. but I think ‘only four forms’ remains basically true). The choice between forms is determined almost entirely by position within a word (initial/medial/final/isolated). All the letters are aligned along the baseline and connect to each other in basically the same way.
By contrast Nastaliq is a much more complicated style. Many letters and letter combinations take on several different forms depending on which other letters surround them. Letter joins are usually diagonal, so letters earlier in a word need to be shifted above the baseline by a variable amount. Having to shift letters vertically as well as horizontally greatly complicates other aspects of the style too.
(I recall seeing a nice table some time ago showing all the various different possibilities for letter joins in Nastaliq. Unfortunately I can’t seem to find it again. Still, you might get some idea by consulting the documentation of one of the existing Nastaliq fonts, e.g. Awami Nastaliq: https://software.sil.org/awami/what-is-special/)
Yeah, but the difficulty isn't in rendering the fonts, it's for the font creator. So once the font is ready with all the combinations it rendering and using a Nastaliq font doesn't differ with rendering a Naskh. Nastaliq fonts are available in Persian, not sure if true for other languages, but it's just more complexity on making the font. For using a ready font the only thing needed is permission to change the font.
Yep, that’s what I meant; thanks for clarifying the point.
(Though that said, a sibling post linked this interesting talk on limitations in OpenType itself: https://www.tiro.com/John/TypeCon2014_Hudson_DECK.pdf)
afaik this is a non-issue with modern text rendering engines. Modern font files include rulesets to determine the forms and shaping engines apply these rules to eventually reach the desired "shape" (i.e. order, position and which glyphs to render). For example, if you use HarfBuzz it should be able to calculate the Glyphs and offsets you need for a properly set script.
I personally spent way to much time trying to understand it, but at least according to this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaA0v0V4RsU) it really is not that difficult if you leave out all the font-selection and emoji shenanigans.
I think at least FreeType (glyph rendering) and HarfBuzz (text shaping) make it needlessly complex through their documentation. It is extensive in describing what the parts do, but the only way to figure out what you need is by fiddling around. As soon as you want to do more complex stuff you're on your own. Especially figuring out which parts you don't need is annoying.
SIL's Nastaliq font uses their own Graphite engine, which is included in Firefox but not other browsers (Demo page: https://graphite.sil.org/graphite_fontdemo ), but e.g. Noto Nastaliq Urdu also exists https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Nastaliq+Urdu?pr... and does a decent job in non-Graphite engines, certainly better than Awami Nastaliq without Graphite.
So the real question is why Android doesn't make it easy to put Noto Nastaliq Urdu in the font stack.
>compelling explanation for why Nastaliq is hard/unavailable
https://www.tiro.com/John/TypeCon2014_Hudson_DECK.pdf
Nastaliq fonts already exist and used whenever possible. Yes, rendering a Nastaliq font takes marginally more compute. But in a world of electron apps which have a 10-100 times slower UX than they could be, saving compute is not an argument.
There are many high quality Nastaliq fonts available. You can install them on your computer and use them easily in whatever software (example office apps) allows you to set the font.
There are no technical reasons preventing the use of Nastaliq fonts everywhere. Only product design decisions by big tech.
My guess would be line height is a challenge and Naskh already exists. Then probably because these scripts are not used often in the places that are centers of software/OS development.
I don't know why people look down their noses at Arabizi
Because people don't want to abandon hundreds or thousands of years of culture for a completely solvable problem.
I don’t know either, but I am aware that in glyph based languages (and this article makes the case that Arabic has some glyph-like features), there is considerable social discussion about the equivalents, like pinyin. Detractors worry that sound-based (where sounds are based on the latin / western orthography) approaches to writing change something fundamental in people’s brains as distinct from more native versions.
In Chinese for instance, you can use a keyboard that combines radicals - parts of a character, or you can use a keyboard that combines phonemes. Those seem likely to change literally how you think in your language. There may be related concerns for Arabic.
That said, one of the complaints in the blog is that two different codepoints render to the same exact letter / phrase / word — this is not a problem unique to Arabic in Unicode, and there are known approaches: I’d expect (I’m not a Unicode expert by any means) that more work on the tech stack for rectification (I’m sure there’s a technical Unicode word for this process of matching codepoints for e.g. search and uniqueness of rendering) would likely be useful for Arabic, and relatively seamlessly flow in many places.
> I’m sure there’s a technical Unicode word for this process of matching codepoints for e.g. search and uniqueness of rendering
That’d be Unicode Normalization. I don’t have an opinion on the best source for more details, so here’s a link from unicode.org https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr15/
I don’t know enough to know whether or not there are still Arabic-specific issues, either in the spec or the implementations.
The example in the article of copy/paste/search is interesting. I think it’s equally likely to be a RtL issue as a normalization bug, but I haven’t done anything significant with either topic.
I would push back about Arabic being glyph based, it's a phoneme rendered beautifully on paper. a modified latin script could faithfully reproduce it semantically except that readers won't be able to stop and smell the roses. Arguably, once someone is accustomed to reading a script, they don't think or care about the aesthetics much, and if they did, that's a bad property for information density anyways
I looked at Arabizi and the numbers are really annoying for formal text etc. Finglish is better in my opinion, however it causes problems like being able to read the same text in two ways. like "dar". The a can be like 'a' in 'dad' or it can be 'a' like in 'car'. with different pronunciation it means 'door' and 'gallow' which can be very annoying in Arabic languages that unlike Persian write _ُ_ِ_ٌ_ً_ٍ_ّ_. Instead of numbers it uses combinations like 'kh' for 'خ', 'gh' for 'ق' and 'غ'. In some methods they use 'aa' for 'a' sound like 'bar' and single 'a' for 'a' sound like 'lad'.
Probably because it's a work around and not what most people want to do. Imagine someone telling you you have to type English in Cyrillic. I know if I could no longer type out Chinese characters and had to use pinyin it would feel very odd and like something was taken away.
For a while, Arabizi was wildly popular and universally used on feature phones. When mobiles became smarter, it was used less. Japanese has romaji and Mandarin has pinyin. Arabic's Arabizi would increase literacy rates and solve all these digital problems.
Romanization is a separate issue to using fixed glyphs.
There was a theory in the XIX / early XX century that full literacy was impossible without the Latin script but such claims are ridiculous especially for Arabic which is an alphabetic script already. China has higher literacy rates than Vietnam, for example.
I don't think the many composition rules of Unicode are really necessary, though. Maybe as an extension for academic work or artistic compositions but not for computing.
If all we had were movable types, all of these language users would find a way to write their language that wouldn't require a Turing-complete computer on each glyph. Now the Unicode gods pander to some of these computer-hostile scripts making the users of different scripts feel slighted.
The vast majority of Japanese and Mandarin speakers are also not in favour of replacing their current writing systems (which give them a link to thousands of years of their own history) in favour of simplified systems. I suspect it is the same for Arabic speakers.
I generally agree with what you're saying, but there is rather famously a simplified form of chinese that was designed specifically to increase literacy rates.
Japanese also underwent simplification post-WW2, but there is important context here.
In both cases, the original plan was for Chinese characters to fall out of use entirely via gradual simplifications, but in both cases the simplifications stopped soon after the first planned stages and it seems very unlikely it would be a popular initiative at this stage. Basically what happened in both cases was the equivalent of a spelling reform, not the elimination of a writing system.
In the case of Japanese, it seems there is some regret around simplification because characters not in the 常用漢字表 do not have the component simplifications applied that the standardised characters do (for instance, 攪拌 is more commonly used than 撹拌 despite the 覚 component being the "modern" simplified form -- and there are characters with no simplified form like the first character in 艱難, first character in 辻褄, or 迄).
Romaji/pinyin are widely used for typing the actual written scripts. They're not seen as alternate written scripts outside of edge case scenarios(like chats in FPS)
It's aesthetically revolting and allows for multiple renderings of the same word.
This seems an esoteric problem for the outsider.
But consider how cursive is dying out in (at least American) English, and how many centuries of writing will become unintelligible to the casual reader as a result.
All of these important cultural artifacts require maintenance.
> All of these important cultural artifacts require maintenance.
This. Arabic users can complain about eg. Unicode not covering their writing in a suitable manner. And I (as a non-Arabic) can certainly see the problems described in the article.
But -going back to earlier days of computing- what stopped Arabic countries from devising a system that does that better than Unicode? (and covers other written languages like Hangul, Japanese or traditional Chinese, better than Unicode covers them)
Seems like that didn't happen? Either too few Arabic people cared, or solution(s) they came up with had shortcomings of their own & weren't implemented widely enough, or Unicode was good enough that few Arabic developers cared to go beyond that.
It's likely the same problem as in Pakistan. Due to the history of colonialism/control by European powers, in these countries personal economic success is usually tied to command of English or French. So even within each of these countries, the rich, educated and those in power prefer latin script. Consequently, there was never any strong push to develop computing technology for local languages.
The other reason is that it's not technologically simple to solve all the issues highlighted in the TFA. Unicode actually does a pretty decent job of setting a uniform standard, but a lot of software has to be written on top of it to get the entire system working: (1) your software must support bidi text, (2) good fonts must be available to display the text in multiple languages (3) textual data needs to be properly stored in unicode and transmitted as is at every point in the OS (4) search engines must deal with the complications of non-breaking spaces and legacy unicode characters.
You have to kind of rewrite the entire stack from top to bottom. Preferential Arabic/Persian/Urdu speakers never had the technical skills and the political power to drive those changes in software largely written in different continents.
This has pretty much already happened for the older style of German cursive, called Kurrent. Partly also because the Nazis got rid of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurrent
Tons of old documents written in it, basically impossible to decipher for anyone that only learned to write "modern" cursive or even print.
Not only writing and printing is hard, so is selection and moving your cursor. Because in most tools, the right and left arrow keys don't mean right and left in Arabic, Persian etc. It's reversed in RTL languages, so right arrow moves the cursor to end direction (left in LTR, right in RTL) and left arrow moves you towards start direction (right in LTR, left in RTL). So in bidirectional text, for example when majority of the text is English and you have a short RTL phrase, you are holding right arrow and then then when you reach the RTL part the cursor suddenly jumps to the start of RTL text, then it goes to left and it SEEMS like you are going backward to the start, not forward. That is until you reach the end of RTL phrase and you teleport to start of next LTR part.
For a while, Arabizi was wildly popular and universally used on feature phones. When mobiles became smarter, it was used less. Japanese has romaji and Mandarin has pinyin. Arabic's Arabizi would increase literacy rates and solve all these digital problems.
Many Arabic-speaking countries already have very high literacy rates. Meanwhile Somali is a related language officially written in the Latin alphabet, but Somalia has a literacy rate around 50%: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cross-country-literacy-ra...
So adopting Arabizi without increasing access to education can be expected to do roughly nothing for literacy, whereas with a good education system, people can learn to read and write in Arabic script just fine.
(2017)
How much of this is still a problem with modern software/font stacks and harfbuzz?
It still is a problem in general, that's why fonts now have webassembly in it.
This repository has a good outlook: https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz-wasm-examples
Oh great. Embed executable <anything> into a format perceived to contain static data - as a core feature. That always worked so well!
True type already has hinting virtual machine. It's not an entirely new thing.
The fact that the article was able to show correct version in regular text is pretty good indicator that if done correctly those are more or less solved problems. I don't disagree that there are probably plenty of times when those mistakes are repeated and solutions not used widely enough (more often for Arabic scripts than other languages), but even for 2017 it feels more like anecdotal examples of what can go wrong ignoring existing technical details. But those mistakes largely come down to having someone who cares and understands the language and technology not for the lack of solutions. There are probably plenty of interesting edge cases that might not be handled perfectly even though solutions for basic cases exist, but article doesn't come even close to discussing those technical details especially if it's only conclusion is "computers introduced more problems, notably because of Unicode".
> The inflexibility persisted and has arguably only become more aggravated in the 20th century
What about 21th century? Digital printing can overlap characters just fine. And modern fonts support context sensitive ligatures and glyph substitutions.
Second/third example those seemed to be caused by more by someone who doesn't understand the language copy pasting stuff.
PDF -> that's just PDF being bad. Text and text search in PDFs tends to mes up even or English.
> with unicode number U+0623, but one can also type أ, which is an alif and a high hamza, represented by unicode numbers U+0627 and U+0654.
That's what Unicode normalization and locale settings are for. Same thing applies to large fraction of latin based scripts other than English, anything which has letters with diacritic marks.
> for كثيره and كثيرة will in most cases yield different results
Similar thing in almost any non English language for example cafe and café or ABC and ⒶⒷⒸ. Although at least some systems handle it reasonably. Not sure how much it is heuristics based on large data (hard to scale across software), and how much it's good application of Unicode character decomposition/normal form tables. Which Arabic letters lack appropriate Unicode decomposition (and other) tables and what are the best practices of unicode normalization/decomposition/locale handling for search (applicable for all languages) are more interesting and actionable topics.
> Not even the simple idea of CJK has been implemented.
Many users of CJK language would argue that CJK unification was a mistake. If different languages prefer different forms of the glyph, they should better be separate characters. Having separate Chinese and Japanese fonts because CJK unified too much just introduces additional points of failure.
> Many users of CJK language would argue that CJK unification was a mistake.
Luckily it's not a decision without turning back. In most relevant contexts you should know the input language and can select a Font specifically using said variations. Of course this information will not be present in plain text, but if it turns out to become an issue I'd wager, since language codes do exist, that a control code-point for language selection can be added to the specification. There's already so many special cases in Unicode that it shouldn't be a huge issue (apart from backwards-incompatibility that would lead to tofu instead of no rendered glyph).
It's 2026 and things like kashida in CSS is not possible. Long way to go to support the Arabic script properly on the web.
And as the article says, since most of the writing is happening on computers, stuff like kashida are going to be forgotten soon.
Hmm. by kashida do you mean something like 'ایـــــــــــــن'?
I don't think you mean this, because I don't know how would you do it in CSS. Looks more like a problem to be solved with different types of character than styling.
You may want to explain more.
there was some attempts to make this happen back in the days. see text-kashida-space. if drop letters are something CSS can own, why not kashida?
Oh hey, second chance queue, nice. I'd originally searched this up because I was curious about how Arabic worked on early computers.
Almost as if the fonts, rendering systems and that all has a vanishingly low percentage of Arabic native-speakers. Why is left as an exercise for the reader.
It's... interesting how the author sees Han Unification as a feature, when it's just a longstanding and politically charged bug. CJK languages are mutually unintelligible, so displaying CJK texts in wrong fonts won't do anything meaningful; it won't make texts in one language readable to speakers of other languages.
Indeed displaying CJK texts in wrong fonts won't do anything to change the meaning and people who can read it in one font can read it in any font. They might complain that it looks ugly because that one stroke should be slightly longer and have a different angle, but those are ultimately aesthetic preferences that don't affect readability.
Even before Unicode, it was established practice that documents mixing Chinese and Japanese would use the same encoding for both and roughly nobody would bother to pick an ugly font for the foreign-language text to make it look appropriately different.
Unicode rightly decided that the fine details of appearance are left to fonts. Otherwise you'd also need e.g. a bunch of extra codepoints so that early-20th-century handwritten letters in German can have their look accurately preserved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BCtterlin
You can't mix encodings in a single file. A file has one encoding only. It was not possible before Unicode to mix two languages in a single file, whether the languages involved were Chinese or Japanese or French(English was an exception).
Now, if a file was encoded in Unicode, and/or if it was in such document format that support inline font specification, such as HTML, then you could mix two languages without having to stick to one language by e.g. wrapping <font face=Helvetica>paragraphs and words</font> <font face=Futura>with tags</font>.
My point is, it seems that the author is not aware that each of CJK languages are only understood within each countries, in both writings and speeches, and that's somewhat peculiar.
You may not be able to mix encodings, but mixing languages has always been possible. If you used a French encoding you would be able to write in English, but not the other way around. I'd wager there are similar cases for cyrillic text. What Unicode gave us is its universality (heh). You don't have to carefully select an encoding able to represent the languages you wish to use anymore.
Why do people still use this horrible-looking and hard to process alphabet? Why not switching to latin (as some countries did) or at least to reform it so that it's easier to type and to read?
Because pretty much no language besides Latin actually maps nicely to the Latin script. Pretty much all languages use digraphs, diacritic symbols or completely new letters in the Latin script (even English, œ and æ, for some time at least).
Having latin alphabet with diacritics and digraphs is still better than something like Arabic. Some non-latin alphabet with letters separate from each other (like Greek, Cyrillic, Armenian, Georgian, etc.) would be fine too.
What’s the point of insulting a script as “horrible looking”. What a silly comment, please grow up.
It's objectively so horrible. Letters have similar form to each other, joints between them makes it harder to take them apart. As I understand, Arabic alphabet wasn't designed to be practical for daily use and only for writing sacred texts.
If you think Arabic horrible because it has connected letters, so is cursive. But I like both cursive and Arabic. You can easily distinguish separate words as the words' letters are connected, and you don't have to put less space to show that some letters are making a word. It's not optimized for printing and digital fonts I agree. But you can't say it's not useful for daily use. It's so much easier on paper.
> But I like both cursive and Arabic
Just a personal esthetic (unpractical) preference.
> It's not optimized for printing and digital fonts I agree. But you can't say it's not useful for daily use.
These two sentences contradict each other. Daily use means printing and reading from screen.
> It's so much easier on paper.
Only if one writes by-hand. Which is unpractical since like press printing has been invented.
>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...
> 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.
How can you describe something as “objectively” horrible-looking? Your opinion on the way that something looks is precisely that: an opinion. I’d add that neither the Arabic nor Latin alphabets were designed for anything. They both evolved organically from other previous alphabets.
> an opinion
I didn't read my comment properly. I have written, why Arabic alphabet is horrible. It's all cursive and letters aren't different enough from each other.
> I’d add that neither the Arabic nor Latin alphabets were designed for anything. They both evolved organically from other previous alphabets.
Many alphabets evolved from a need for daily stuff like accounting, where practicality matters. Arabs didn't have widespread alphabet until they needed writing their sacred texts, so, they have invented an alphabet primary designed for that. Other alphabetical systems were already widespread in the regions currently dominated by the Arabic alphabet and many of them look much better.
> Arabs didn't have widespread alphabet until they needed writing their sacred text
Many tens of thousands of pre-Islamic inscriptions made by Arabs are known. Arabs had been writing for centuries before the Quran, and the current Arabic script is just an iteration of earlier scripts. You might want to educate yourself.
Why should all writing be forced into 1 way of doing things? That just sounds disrespectful of other peoples' culture.
His username is a Nazi anti-tank weapon. I suspect "disrespectful of other peoples' culture" is an understatement for OP.