Comment by jmopp | Hacker News Reader

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Comment by jmopp | Hacker News Reader

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At the same time that Europe was conquering America, the Mughals were conquering India. But the Arabic script did not supplant Devanagari in India. Had the Islamic empires adopted the printing press as strongly as the Europeans did, one could very well imagine proto-Urdu texts flooding India, literacy in the Arabic script being a requirement for social advancement, and Devanagari being relegated to religious use.

The Arabic script is harder to print using movable types compared to the latin script. It's an important reason for the lack of adoption of the printing press in languages using the Arabic script (historically speaking of course).

Interesting theme for a novel.

I think Mughals were more Persian than Arabic

Persian is written using a variant of the Arabic script, as is Urdu.

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