Hello, Straightdopers; AMAPAC here with a question about the comparitive granularity–if that’s the right word–between English text vs. Arabic script.
I was reading about Islam on Wikipedia; the article has some Arabic words and sentences in it, which are of course rendered by the computer. I don’t read Arabic, but an English translation is provided for most words there.
I was struck at how tiny the differences between the letters and words seemed in the Arabic script as compared to the English letters. Even the difference between the letter ‘m’ and ‘n’ seems very large compared to what seems to me to be the very infinitesimal difference between what must be letters in the Arabic language.
I’m sure some of the difference can be explained by my English chauvinism, but still, it really would seem to be hard to distinguish letters–and thus, words–in the Arabic as presented on the screen.
I don’t know about Arabic, but in English this is font-dependent. In some fonts the letters are deliberately made to look more similar than in other fonts.
Arabic and Latin alphabets derive, originally, from the same alphabet. And keep in mind that most Arabic letters have at least 3 forms-- depending if it is at the beginning, end or middle of a word. Most of what you are seeing is the middle form, which is generally the abbreviated form, and that probably makes them look more similar.
There is no reason that two adjacent letters should be similar. G and H aren’t much alike. The order of the alphabets do change over time. Alpha and Omega start and finish the Greek alphabet, but not the Latin alphabet we use (derived from Greek).
That being said, there are some Arabic letters that differ only by where you place the dots.
Oh… and you’re seeing cursive Arabic, which is generally the way it is written. Cursive English would tend to make the letters blend more. And in Arabic, you don’t write the vowels, so fewer letters.
The trick with reading Arabic is not to read the letters, but rather to read the dots:
1 dot under = b
2 dots under = y
3 dots under = p (Persian)
1 dot over = n
2 dots over = t
3 dots over = th
In handwriting, they tend to smoosh the dots together into lines. 2 dots winds up being a small horizontal line, and 3 dots winds up being a pointy hat shape. Makes things a lot easier to read, actually.
Geeky aside: the name of the star Betelgeuse is actually based on a misreading of the Arabic yad al-Jauzaa, ‘the Hand of Orion’. The translator apparently mistakenly read yad (يد) as bad (بد).
I think it’s a combination of chauvinism and reality. There really are several characters in Arabic script that are written the same and are only differentiated by the dots. You can see the alphabet here.
In regular reading meant for adults, the dots are only included if it’s otherwise impossible to tell from context what a certain word means. So that can increase the similarity the letters have to each other.
I’m not sure the purpose of this statement. I do not read the OP as saying that adjacent letters should be similar. The letters m and n are used as examples of letters that are similar in English. There appears to be a much greater difference between them than some arabic letters.
But he probably should have picked i and j. In some fonts, the difference is how long the line is.
The habit of distinguishing between I and J is somewhat recent, and you can say they both derived from the same letterform. They haven’t had very much time to diverge.
(Another recent addition is U as distinct from V, which makes calling W ‘double-you’ more logical. A somewhat recent loss is the medial s, which is the letter that makes people think Shakespeare and Jefferson had ‘purfuits’ and ‘poffeffions’* instead of ‘pursuits’ and ‘possessions’.)
*(Using the medial s that enthusiastically is probably horrible style. My tafteleffneff is not to impugn the scribal conventions of any former age.)
It’s not that dots that are left out. The dots distinguish different letters, as you note, and the writing would be illegible without them. What is often left out are the short vowels and other diacritical markings.
I would also point out that you will see more “granularity” if you look at some non-Arabic languages that use Arabic script. Go to wikipedia and click on the arabic page (the first language listed, in arabic script) and the Farsi page (the language listed before French).
I’m going to second that. Leaving out the dots doesn’t make sense, as they are critical to legibility. Without the vowels, which are typically not written, I can’t see how one would read Arabic script without the dots.
I am not an Arabic speaker but my wife is and I have a passing familiarity with Arabic script.
It is always the way it is written. There is no print form of Arabic as for languages using the Latin alphabet.
Usually you don’t but script with vowel markingsis common enough. It’s more complex than English because many vowels are indicated by marks above the letters, rather than as letters in their own right.
I do not have have primary evidence of this but my wife’s cousin, who is Egyptian, told me last month that the dots are a relatively recent innovation in the language (perhaps a few hundred years old) and they haven’t always been there. Similar to how one can read the language without vowel markings, one can generally interpret from context without the dots.