If you are sitting next to someone on public transportation who irritates you...

[Alex]

Maybe, but if it does say something, you (someone anyway) are now sitting at work with "BLOW UP AMERICA IN THE NAME OF GOD" or something equivelant flowing through your workplace servers, triggering NSA monitors (in the other web site it was hidden in unreadable flash).

You might want to keep an eye out for black Escalades following you around your daily routine.

Besides, is not written Arabic in an easy first-place tie with Thai as the most visually beautiful language?

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by Alex Stroup

Well, I'm pretty sure I have the correct consonent sounds involved but a difficulty in Arabic is that short vowel sounds are not written, they're just known by the speaker of the language.

Are they never written, or is it like Hebrew where they can be written in formal writing, but rarely are used by native speakers?

[Alex]

If I'm remembering correctly, only in sacred writing (such as the Quran). My recollection of the history is that they were originally part of the writing system (and thus the Quran) but that over time they were dropped and only written if there was ambiguity, but when printing was introduced to the written word, the complexity of it lead to dropping them completely except in sacred texts where alteration is forbidden. Arabic keyboards generally don't even have the ability to produce short vowels. The complexity of Arabic printing comes from the fact that the exact shape of a letter changes based on the letters than come before and after it (as well as the position on the horizontal line). For example this bit consists of four letters:

لداب

and this is the same text except the second letter has been removed resulting in a completely different visual presentation of the first and third letters (remember, read from right to left):

لاب


But at least they have word breaks.

[innerSpaceman]

Yes, beautiful.


But, there's a candidate for the dead languages pool if ever there was one. Sheesh.

Originally Posted by Alex Stroup

the exact shape of a letter changes based on the letters than come before and after it (as well as the position on the horizontal line).

Whose ancient bright idea was that?

[Alex]

It's the same idea we have for cursive English (to a certain degree), there's just no such thing as non-cursive Arabic.

Besides, its positively advanced. There are plenty of other older languages that don't write vowels of any kind and don't have spaces between the words (nor, the relatively recent invention of punctuation). Also, it is helpfully phonetic rather than pictographic.

[Cadaverous Pallor]

Originally Posted by innerSpaceman

Whose ancient bright idea was that?

Hebrew has a somewhat similar (thought, IMHO, a bit less complex) concept, where certain letters look different if they are the last letter in a word. Five of the 22 letters do this.

The letter "mem" looks like this in the middle of a word מ but like this at the end of a word ם

Of course, it just looks right to me

[Alex]

And of course, in Latin and Greek alphabet based writing systems we have the silly idea of having two forms of each letter, one of which is only used as the first letter of a sentence and in other incomprehensible (to non-native writers) situations -- the rules for which change from from specific language to specific language). "Yes, students, aspirin was spelled Aspirin until it was used so much that a form of verbal erosion wore that A into an a."

I have also long wondered if the earliest scribes among the semitic languages were all left handed and that is why they wrote from right to left (as opposed to the more brilliant Chinese who decided on ambidextrous top to bottom).

[innerSpaceman]

Are those different looking arabic or hebrew characters in the middle of whatever communicating something specific by their difference? If so, I think that is useful. Just as upper case letters are very useful for denoting the start of sentences and the presence of proper names.

What, if anything, do the different-looking arabic or hebrew characters denote?

[Alex]

Why do you need a capital letter to denote the start of a sentence when you have a piece of punctuation doing the same thing right before it? And "Hey Steve, how was your day?" doesn't really contain any more information than "hey steve, how was your day?"

I don't know if there is any logical origin for why it is the way it is. I'd assume it is because it started out purely as a written cursive language and some letter combination flow together differently than others for ease of writing and over the centuries it became institutionalized (that's a wild-assed guess, though). And some of the letter pairs do have distortions of sound from how the letters are pronounced individually (but I don't recall if this is true in all cases). Such ligatures are common in many writing systems (Korean has them for all of its vowel combinations, I believe) and have equivelants in English and other Latin-based writing systems. It would be easy to imagine English having a situation where "h" and "t" combine to a new looking form when an "h" follows a "t." And as a very faint vestigial we can see such a thing when an "e" follows an "a" at the beginning of a word, such as in "Mt. Ætna." In German, if you find yourself needing to write two consecutive s'es then you don't write "ss" but rather "ß" and until about 250 years ago in English the same thing happened where that "ss" was instead written as a very tall single s that a lot of people see now and think is some weird "f" without the crossbar. As with the unnecessary short vowels in Arabic, the invention of typesetting and then later the limited real estate of typewriter keys pushed many of these oddities out of the mainstream and possibly out of the language (the cent sign is almost extinct in general usage because the earliest computer keyboards didn't have room for it).

But all languages (spoken and written) have elements that seem completely stupid and useless to people who don't use them natively. For example why does English have fewer letters than phonemes, requiring us to assign multiple phonemes to the same letter? Why does Japanese not allow (except in very rare cases) consecutive consonants but Czech allows several consecutives? Why are German nouns gendered essentially randomly but Russian nouns are gendered using very explicit rules? Why does Japanese have three different writing systems, which may be used all within a single sentence? How do so many languages get along without an equivelant of "a" and "the" while others can't go more than three words without using one of them? Why does the Russian alphabet, otherwise phonetic, contain two letters that don't actually represent specific phonemes?

Languages are quirky. That's what makes them interesting. If we were to plan them out we'd all speak the same one and there'd be five rules.

I remember a fellow linguistics student in my wife's program (from some south African country) who thought Western punctuation was the most retarded thing in the world since it essentially treats the reader (in his view) like an idiot that can't read unless every little nuance is provided explicitly (punctuation is much less necessary in fully inflected languages since they essentially self diagram).


Wow. Super-duper long winded. Just goes to show how boring Babel is since I wrote most of this while watching it.

[innerSpaceman]

Originally Posted by Alex Stroup

Why do you need a capital letter to denote the start of a sentence when you have a piece of punctuation doing the same thing right before it? And "Hey Steve, how was your day?" doesn't really contain any more information than "hey steve, how was your day?"

You need a capital letter to indicate the start of something new. A period indicates an end. A capital letter indicates a start. They are mostly used in conjunction with one another, but not always. A capital letter follows a colon, but a lowercase letter follows a semi-colon. That's (generally speaking) because the idea following a colon is new, and the idea following a semi-colon is a continuation.

Thus the start indication of a capital letter is unique, and may or may not properly follow from the particular end point of the previous statement.


The usefulness of capital letters to denote names is self-explanatory. steve is NOT the same as Steve. See the famous Star Trek episode where the replacment doctor insisted on calling the android "data" rather than "Data." It's important to indicate proper names as such.





I'm not contending the quirks of other written languages aren't interesting, merely that the quirks resulting from visual writing styles do not communicate any information in and of themselves. That is not true of English, where the differences in upper and lowercase characters do indeed communicate very particular information.