[jagaerglad]

I sometimes hear the same in my circles about Persian ditching the perso-arabic script. I don't get it, why can't you align a country however you like without creating a huge rift between a big population and years of literature, material etc etc? One can learn multiple scripts and almost all literate people know the latin script globally nowadays. Besides, sad to see the whole world just use the latin script in the end but that's not the point

[xdennis]

Probably because Persian is an Indo-European language, and alphabets are better than abjads (alphabet without vowels) for it.

Semitic languages are easy to write without vowels because the meaning is very obvious even if you omit the vowels, but in many languages you have a great deal of collisions if you omit vowels.

It's the same reason Chinese characters are a poor fit for Korean and Japanese. Chinese is not an inflected language so one symbol for a word works quite nicely, but other languages need a way to add prefixes and suffixes to works.

[jagaerglad]

You are entirely free to put vowel diacritics when writing with the perso-arabic script and it's done in children's books. By that logic Vietnamese shouldn't be written with the latin script since it's sino-tibetian

Also, middle persian had a native abjad [1]. (As well as a derived alphabet [2])

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pahlavi_scripts

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avestan_alphabet

[toast0]

Sharing a writing system helps with communication across cultures, even when there isn't a shared language.

> One can learn multiple scripts and almost all literate people know the latin script globally nowadays.

If almost all literate people know the latin script, there's a benefit to writing your language in it. Of course, the switching cost is high.

[oneshtein]

Latin script creates lot of confusion in mixed environments. For example, even native speakers of English language, major language of the world, have no clue how to read aloud random texts written using Latin alphabet.

[toast0]

Certainly, I don't expect the average English only speaker to be able to properly pronounce Gaelic, Polish, or Vietnamese words, or frankly even obscure English words by sight.

The results are likely much better than random texts using cyrillic, greek, arabic, hangul, etc.

Otoh, If they're typists, I expect they can likely type them into a search, probably sans diacritics, but that's likely good enough for searching or looking through a translation dictionary.

Greek and Cyrillic may share enough symbols that a latin script user can make due with an onscreen keyboard or a dictionary with great effort. But a completely different script would need even more effort.

[jagaerglad]

Language in the scope of a cultural phenomenon is something way beyond just cost or efficiency in communication

thats way wi dont rayt English veri efishent ither

[jmalicki]

> without creating a huge rift between a big population and years of literature, material etc etc

Sometimes, that is the point.

[woozlewuzzle]

Out of curiosity, what's the proposed replacement script?

[jagaerglad]

mostly latin with a sprinkle of proposals to revive the avestan alphabet or middle persian script. I wouldn't say it's a huge debate at all in general though