[eggy]

Reminds me of some similarities to Arabic. Arabic uses root words, usually 3 consonants, that mean many similar things with surrounding letters. K-T-B means writing. Kitab means book. Kitaba is writing.

The script is hard, and you have to learn enough of the roots and recognize them to get the meaning. Indonesian is slightly similar: tinju is boxing and petinju is boxer. Prefixes on roots to build up and guess meaning from context.

[zogrodea]

I like Arabic's diacritic system which makes pronounciation of a word you've only previously read predictable.

I remember once pronouncing "stoic" as "stoyc" instead of "stow-ik" once in English for example. My limited knowledge of Arabic indicates that one diacritic produces "aah"-like vowels, another produces "ooh"-like vowels and another "iih"-like vowels, and even though some other modifiers come into play later, it's still predictiable how a word is pronounced just from reading it. Would be happy to be corrected if I am wrong.

[kybernetikos]

If you're a fan of diacritics, you can write stoïc in English. Apparently the New Yorker uses them still. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-...