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Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

Arabic hasn't "modernised" in quite the same way many western languages have, which makes it quite interesting. Since it has stayed a written-only language for quite some time, the letters were not broken up, and its joined-up form has stayed into the digital age (at least, I assume this is why)

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Not sure if "modernized" is appropriate in this context, since productive abbreviation in western languages dates to antiquity, i.e. Latin.

I don't mean just abbreviation, I mean Arabic hasn't seen certain types of changes that have occurred in Western languages. Although, arguably, Latin has always been fundamentally a non-cursive script, and Arabic has always been cursive, perhaps.

Ah, I see. I think you may have it backwards, though: script Arabic developed around the same time as lower-case letters in Greek and Latin (very roughly 0CE), coinciding one presumes with growing use of paper for writing. While Latin eventually incorporated its older "upper-case" forms with a minor grammatical function, Arabic discarded them altogether as antiquated. In that sense, one might well make the case that Arabic is in fact the more "modern" alphabet.

I don't think the timeline for the development of the Arabic script is quite right. I believe it's more typically put 3-400 CE, with the Nabatean script slowly accruing Arabic-like features over time.

Of course, my knowledge of the history of writing extends to a single undergrad course and a quick skim of Wikipedia as a refresher. I'll happily admit I'm wrong if that turns out to be the case.

I didn't mean to imply modern Arabic script came to be then -- it wasn't what we'd call Arabic today before the Quran -- only that evolution from inscribed block capitals to written script was happening at around the same time as that transition in other languages.

Anyway, in this context I'm counting 300BCE - 300CE as "very roughly 0CE".

You're quite correct. The old 'Latin' script (our uppercase letters) where revived in the renaissance - and were slowly merged with the Hunnish script (our lower case letters) - about the same time as they adopted Arabic numerals (read right to left, for added confusion).

Other alphabets (Greek and Cyrillic) created capital letters in emulation much later (circa 1800's). Most alphabets/sylabaries (Arabic, Hebrew, Korean, Japanese, etc) don't have upper and lower cases.

Likewise punctuation, which prosidic languages (like English) need to signal stress and emphasis which can transform meaning, but which are also absent from lots of other writing systems.

I think talk of 'more modern' or 'less modern' is nonsense though. Writing is an imperfect representation of speaking, and whatever works is just fine.

Hebrew has upper and lower case.

No—there are cursive and block letters, but one is not the lower case version of the other.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_alphabet

Even so it still seems apparent that modern Latin alphabets have been adapted for typesetting, whereas even contemporary written Arabic seems to remain optimized for handwriting. It seems reading Arabic is a lot more difficult than reading Latin based writing, language issues aside, simply becuase the letters are all joined together.

Aside from abbreviations, what do you mean?

I don't see how cursive script makes Arabic less “modern.” It might make carving it onto stone a bit harder, but the printing press, the typewriter, and the computer all had no problems producing quality Arabic type.

Having written code which renders Arabic text, I found “joining” up the letters to be quite simple. It's just a few rules to choose which glyph to display for each character depending on context. The tricky bits, I found, is in integrating a right-to-left script with systems which were made with only left-to-right in mind.

Ever tried dealing with vertical column text (e.g. Japanese?). I haven't myself, but the fact Microsoft made fonts on Japanese versions of Windows have special "@"-prefixed versions rotated 90 degrees, so if a document is written in it, then changed to that font and rotated, it's the right way up, makes me suspect it's pretty difficult.

That sounds like the result of a lack of forethought when designing the font rendering code, and not because it's a big problem. I've used vertical Japanese text input extensively in Word without any problems.

mixing RTL and LTR is a pain in unix-like tools (gnu, os x).

What I usually (not always) found out diring my experiments woth Persian is that the gnu tools themselves deal with it quite fine - but the terminal application shows them at pretty random places. If there is both LTR and RTL in one file, havoc usually ensues.

(persian also has this funny "invisible space", but it causes only small annoyances)

I digress, but I think this is one of the most annoying things about Unix these days. I practically live by the command line; but terminals are terrible. We're basically emulating technology that was already getting obsolete in the 70s!

Plan 9 had the courage to shed this cruft by having simple text windows which have a prompt. No curser addressing and no crazy control codes. That makes rendering it just as easy (and beautiful) as rendering text box contents. I wish the Linux desktop environments would follow suit.

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