| A couple of corrections I feel I have to make as an Arab. > There are the diacritics to think about, but outside of the Quran they are simply ignored. They are not ignored - when they are present, attention is paid to them. I think what you mean is that Arabic speakers, knowing what the diacritics are, do not bother writing them down. That is not because they ignore them, it is because we have paid such close attention to them when learning Arabic that we no longer need to be reminded of them. > That's still a big problem for a universal language of the internet though, since written Arabic is highly non-phonetic. Arabic is highly phonetic, and if being phonetic was a criterion for being universal language of the internet, English should be disqualified immediately. On arrival in England at the age of 10, I had no idea how English people knew how to pronounce their words. Now I know that non-Arab speakers may think the same way about Arabic because we do not write down the diacritics by default... but it is easy to buy books that have these diacritics written, and thus to crack the code. But English seemed designed to trap foreigners into mispronunciations, to the great amusement of my classmates. (Traveling to America after college, it was mostly place names that tripped me up.) |