I don't really know enough about Turkic languages to say whether Latin is a better fit for them than Arabic, or not. I would expect modern Turkish alphabet to be better at it, if only because it was specifically designed for that purpose, and not just organically adopted the way Arabic was.
But my point wasn't about which one is a better fit, but rather which one was historically used for that particular language first, and for the longest period of time, and used to produce the most past cultural artifacts. And in this case, it would be Arabic.
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).
Well, in the case of Turkish, the old works were still in Turkish, except they were written in arabic alphabet. They were just republished in latin alphabet.
That vowels are an afterthought in Semitic scripts is not an “Orientalist claim” at all, it’s completely mainstream archaeology. The use of some consonant letters to denote long vowels (as so-called matres lectionis) was a development subsequent to the use of a purely consonantal writing system.
With regard to Turkic, one of the challenges with using the Arabic script is not just that Turkic has a larger vowel inventory than Arabic or Persian, but the frontness/backness of vowels plays a major part in the morphophonemics. The Orkhon script that was the first used for Turkic languages was designed to reflect this, but when the Arabic script was introduced in towards the Middle Turkic era new strategies had to be thought up to reflect frontness/backness, e.g. the use of Arabic emphatic stops versus non-emphatic ones. However, the solutions that were found left a lot of room for ambiguity. I often read Kazan Tatar documents in the old Arabic script, and I can understand how the plethora of rules and exceptions confused the masses prior to the introduction of the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. (The Cyrillic script now in use is hardly better than the Arabic script, though)
Out of curiosity, were there attempts/proposals for adopting the Orkhon script (or variant)? Wouldn't it be more natural/easier to use for a turkic language?
Link to Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Turkic_alphabet
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.
Then alphabets evolved from that like Latin and Greek with all the bells and whistles. Semitic scripts on the other hand remained true to its roots and didn't evolve to have dedicated vowels early on.
Arabic as a Semitic language descended from Syriac and Aramaic and thus lacked distinct vowels. Heck early Arabic script didn't make any effort to differentiate similar looking consonants as diacritic were totally missing. Case in point, Hejazi Script, one of the early Arabic scripts lacked vowels, vowel diacritics and consonant diacritics but only possessed the defining quality of cursive/adjoining writing.
However, for later versions of the Arabic script, things improved substantially esp. when it had the full support and backup of the then-young and burgeoning Islamic state, and thus it underwent a complete overhaul where it got all the bells and whistles of other alphabets but retaining a few distinctive features like compactness.
So, yeah you can say that vowels were afterthought in early Arabic scripts but definitely not for the current system in use for centuries now and that's why I characterized his/her statement as an orientalist claim that's completely inaccurate and improper.
For Ottoman Turkish, I get the frustration that some Turkish speakers may have had with reading or writing in Arabic script. Original Arabic script is not supposed to be a drop-in replacement for any language. It needs first to be extended and re-purposed to meet the requirements of the target language and with languages like Turkish with a wider selection of vowels, it gets tricky to work around the limitations of the script like vowel diacritics.
Absent these additions and workarounds, it becomes more advisable to make the switch to more accommodative script like Latin and forgo the succinctness and terseness gains of the Arabic script and that's why I view Kurdish written in Arabic script as a big mess as the developers opted to full hard code of the vowels in the script while dropping vowel diacritics altogether.
At the same time though, the new Turkish state pushed universal literacy as a policy goal and invested enormously in it in a way that the Ottoman empire didn't at all. It's very difficult to extract from data of that period (which may also have been manipulated for political purposes) how much of that change as due to the script vs other factors.
While I don't think it's controversial that phonetically written languages are easier to learn at first, nor that the Turkish Ottoman alphabet based on Arabic was not ideal for writing Turkish, I don't think it was uniquely difficult.
I think it's about as difficult as writing English correctly using our alphabet, which is to say it is harder than Spanish but much easier than writing Chinese languages.
Note that literacy rates in Arabic speaking parts of the Ottoman empire - most of it - where the script and the language matched was also low. You can make the argument that Arabic diglossia was responsible for some of that but still)
nama but : nama darm : namo [sang]
altun önglüg y(a)ruk yaltrik
-lig kopda kôtrülmis nom iligi
atl(i)g nom bitigde kilinç
adartmakin ôçürmek atl(i)g
bisinç bölük üçü[nç tegz]
IIRC, proto-sinaitic gave birth to Phoenician and Arabic (with some lost alphabets like Moabite in there somewhere). Phoenician is the main branch, often called the original alphabet, and its two children are Aramaic and Greek, with alphabets in the "east" being likely descended from Aramaic (Brahmi script, proto-Farsi and Parthian, Syrian) and those in the "west" descendent from Greek (Latin, Armenian, Cyrillic, Coptic). Thus you would in fact expect Mongolian, being in the east, to be an offshoot of Aramaic if you knew it had an alphabet (it could be like Mandarin without an alphabet). That's the real question -- does it have an alphabet or not.
I only say this because a lot of people think that Aramaic script is some exotic thing, but it was the official language of the Persian (Achaemenid) Empire, which was quite large, stretching from India to North Africa, and Aramaic was a lingua franca of that era.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achaemenid_Empire
It is a writing system found in Eurasia. Hit its wikipedia pages, on the right hand side there'll be a little thingie that lists 'parent systems', you can follow it back to Phoenician which also happens to be an ancestor of the Latin alphabet.
It was the attempt to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs into Phoenician which led to all of today's alphabetic languages. Archaeologists recently found a temple in the Jordan area in which the earliest known attempt at an alphabetic language was written; it was a translation between Egyptian and Phoenician.
Alphabetic, non pictographic languages are an order of magnitude easier to learn and express than pictographic languages, which require rote memorization of hundreds to thousands of pictographs and their modifiers. In contrast, the language you're reading this post in allows you to guess the sound of the words by the spelling, which is simply impossible in, say, Mandarin.
Egyptian hieroglyphs are probably one of the better choices for exotic writing that most people won't be able to correct you on since it is not generally used for any contemporary language. Arabic, Chinese and English are bad choices, someone will eventually let you know.
But my point wasn't about which one is a better fit, but rather which one was historically used for that particular language first, and for the longest period of time, and used to produce the most past cultural artifacts. And in this case, it would be Arabic.
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