[616c]

I understand you might find my comments on history annoying, but I was pointing out a few things because the average reader is not familiar with such things, namely these scripts are not specific to Urdu despite Urdu reading-writing communities appreciating it and there is some undertone that Arabic scripts of lesser beauty are being forced upon Urdu readers and writers. All of them come from Arabic (not just the letters, the scripts) as well, and as an Arabic speaker I find that attitude strange. I could be reading too much into it.

And thanks for your notes re politicization of Arabic and script. I happen to live in that part of the world, hence I know.

Off-topic: saw your bio blurb and saw what you write about. Sounds cool. I will definitely try to read your stuff when I have some down time.

[alieteraz]

You write: "All of them come from Arabic (not just the letters, the scripts) as well, and as an Arabic speaker I find that attitude strange. I could be reading too much into it."

I think that's where our disconnect lies and I do think you're reading too much into it. Urdu is not a child of Arabic. The word itself is Turkish, and the old story about Urdu's genesis is that it amalgamated during the military conquests of Babar, a Central Asian Turk who was funded by the Ottomans but operated independently. A great percentage of Urdu was Turkish (I once heard upto 40% of the words are Turkish), and it contains many Sanskrit words as well. This notion that Urdu is a "Muslim" language, and because of that, it has some special relationship or descent from Arabic, is more of a 20th century phenomenon having to do with Pakistan's affiliation with the Arab world as a result of becoming an Islamic Republic. That's what I think. You are welcome to try and persuade me that Urdu is some kind of Arabic-lite. But in my experience except for a very small minority of very recently Arabized Pakistanis, I have never heard of that view. What I have seen more frequently, however, is resentment against the idea that Urdu is Arabic's baby. Its kind of like how the Anglicans would resent being declared Children of Catholicism. Sure, without revolting against the Church there would not Anglicanism, but that doesn't mean that an Anglican would like to be told, "you came from Catholicism."

I will give you an example. I once had an Arab yell at me for pronouncing Eteraz with a zay ending. He tried to show me that since in Arabic Eteraz ends with a dawd, and since a dawd is a hard sound, I should pronounce it Eterawd. I gently reminded him that for me it comes from Urdu and Persian and I will pronounce it with a Z. That may irk an Arabic purist. But only if he thinks that all languages written in Arabic-script should follow Arabic's rules, which makes no sense. By that logic, Indians should demand that all people who count with a zero in their system should pronounce their numbers in Sanskrit.

I did not intend to write this much in response to that one sentence, but your point of view is something I've experienced frequently enough that I felt inclined to respond longer. It is not just Arabs who say things like this, too. As I mentioned it now includes Pakistanis themselves, who consider themselves "of Arab culture." An example of these Pakistanis are kids in Lahore, Pakistan, who have a license plate tag that reads, "al-Bakistan." They want to Arabize. In you they would have an ally, I imagine :).

I appreciate you looking into my other work. If you get a chance to check out the short story collection, you will find a pre-Islamic story set in Mecca there. There is also a story set in an imaginary state called Islamistan, and there I adhere to Arabic rules of transliteration instead of Urdu or Persian i.e. Dhulfaqar instead of Zulfikar, etc.

[616c]

> You write: "All of them come from Arabic (not just the letters, the scripts) as well, and as an Arabic speaker I find that attitude strange. I could be reading too much into it."

>

> I think that's where our disconnect lies and I do think you're reading too much into it. Urdu is not a child of Arabic.

Ok. I think I should have been more clear. Urdu is not Arabic. I specifically mean the script, Nastaliq, and Arabic aphabet as used in Urdu is from Arabic (even though, as we are both aware, letters were added to compensate for the lack of certain letters in the original Arabic alphabet, re your Pakistan->Bakistan comment).

As for your insights in pronunciation, I LOVE the irony here. I was also studying Farsi for a while, and I routinely had trouble with this dispartiy, as I had to relearn sounds. It is hard to shake as the eight plus years of Arabic will not go away overnight. I also had friends who were advanced Farsi students with the opposite problem. And I have a father-in-law who teaches Arabic, and unfortunately I hear students and him confirm the religious Pakistani students are poor performers and/or argumentative in class: they have trouble realizing the difference between their knowledge of Arabic vocab and pronunciation through Quranic Arabic, Urdu, and complete inexperience for formal Standard Arabic (which is different from Quranic). I have also been party to these arguments, and heard of them. I have also been silly with my stuff.

In any event, I am amazed I am having this conversation on HN. I thought there would be such little interest in this topic. I am glad to have talked to you and others about this. I thought no one cares.

[jefftk]

    Its kind of like how the Anglicans would resent being
    declared Children of Catholicism. Sure, without revolting
    against the Church there would not Anglicanism, but that
    doesn't mean that an Anglican would like to be told, "you
    came from Catholicism."

This doesn't touch your main point, but I don't think most Anglicans have trouble with the idea that it comes from Catholicism.

[j-b]

Very true, hence the term 'Anglo-Catholic':

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Catholicism

[simonh]

I'm at a loss to find where 616c in any way talked about Urdu as a language as descending from or owing anything to the Arabic language. All of his comments were specifically about the script. Unless 616c has radically edited the post since you responded to it.

[thaumasiotes]

If your goal here is really to "reject[] the cultural Arabization of South Asia", have you considered writing your Urdu in... devanagari? Using nastaliq is already a pro-arabization move.

[sampo]

Apparently Nastaʿlīq was (a) developed in Iran (which is not an Arab country), and although it was developed as a combination of Nasḫ (Naskh) and Taʿlīq scripts, (b) it was never really used in the Arab lands, but in the Persian, Turkic, and South Asian spheres of influence.

So if the people in Pakistan feel that Nastaʿlīq is "their own" writing system and Naskh symbolizes Arab imperialism, in my opinion they have all the rights to feel that way.

Really, even if the script evolved from Arabic script, that was 700 years ago, and what matters in this matter is how the people feel about their letters today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasta%CA%BFl%C4%ABq_script

[thaumasiotes]

> what matters in this matter is how the people feel about their letters today

Sure. It's a political decision. alieteraz even states that the reason he feels strongly about font choice is politics, and observes that current Pakistanis (overall) want to Arabize more than they already have. But for some reason, the article's arguments amount to "naskh is ugly", which is completely irrelevant to the dispute. (There's also a weird idea that nastaliq presents such insurmountable technical challenges that even if Pakistanis strongly preferred it, for example if naskh was viewed as an affront to Pakistani culture, there would still be no reliable way to type in it. And also that various organizations, from Pakistani governmental departments to Microsoft, have already implemented nastaliq fonts.)

This reminds me quite strongly of Megan McArdle's observation that when an election is actually about gentrification, the attack ads focus on ineffable concepts like "respect", because it's not felt to be workable to say "we want the whites to stop moving in, and in fact we also want the ones who are already here to get out". If you want to fight for Pakistani separation from the Arab cultural sphere, say so, and point out the problems with Arab cultural affiliation. If alieteraz is a true weirdo and Pakistan's choice of font matters more to him than its cultural orientation, he still needs to make the argument for separating from the Arab world, because, as he points out himself, what's actually happening is that the people of Pakistan want to Arabize further.

[alieteraz]

The "people of Pakistan" are not a monolith. So some of them want Arabization and some do not and some want Westernization and so forth. As for the ugliness of naskh, its not that naskh is ugly, its that the naskh based mutant on digital devices is ugly. Also angular Urdu, generally speaking, is dissonant and hard to read for Urdu speakers. Here is an email I got since last night:

Hey Ali,

I loved your essay on The Death of Urdu Script. Nastaliq was the default script when reading Urdu books in schools. Therefore, I am so used to reading Urdu in Nastaliq that I cannot read properly in Naskh. And because I am a tech entreprenuer who works online, I am forced to read Urdu in Naskh. Therefore, over years I have lost interest in the Urdu language.

If Nastaliq is revived and becomes a common script online, I will be sure to read Urdu more.

[thaumasiotes]

Psychologists in the Dark Time did experiments that showed people couldn't read ALL CAPITAL LETTERS as easily as they could read lowercase. From that, in a wild leap of imagination, they concluded that lowercase letters were easier to read than capitals.

Unsurprisingly, that was garbage. Later psychologists easily documented that the reason test subjects read lowercase text faster was because they were used to it -- the advantage of lowercase quickly erodes as the subjects gain practice reading capitalized text.

What I'm saying is, this problem:

> I am so used to reading Urdu in Nastaliq that I cannot read properly in Naskh

is imaginary, not real.

> The "people of Pakistan" are not a monolith. So some of them want Arabization and some do not and some want Westernization and so forth.

Note how I summarized you as saying "current Pakistanis (overall) want to Arabize". Who's winning? If you're angry about being on the losing side, whining about ugly fonts is misplaced. Whine about the thing you're actually upset about.

[alieteraz]

Note the frowny face. He's a Pakistani.

https://twitter.com/kamilwaheed/status/481792094135009280

[selimthegrim]

Plenty of people in India do this.

[thaumasiotes]

Yes, I know, but Urdu written in devanagari isn't called "Urdu", it's called "Hindi". The only thing reifying "Urdu" at all is the choice to make a cultural affiliation with the Arab world.

[selimthegrim]

Especially around Lucknow, there are certainly vocabulary differences, and some very minor grammatical ones (matching numbers in verbal phrases, some nouns changing gender, but overall yes, I see your point). I would be interested in your opinion of what Kamleshwar's novel Kitne Pakistan was written in or Munshi Premchand's early work published in Devanagari?

[thaumasiotes]

> I would be interested in your opinion of what Kamleshwar's novel Kitne Pakistan was written in or Munshi Premchand's early work published in Devanagari?

You've exceeded the bounds of my knowledge, but I can provide some generalities. Writing systems can have no effect on the, um, "identity" of a language, since it's quite possible for people to be illiterate. So to me, saying something is written in Urdu, or saying something is written in Hindi, are exactly the same claim about the language involved. I have been taught that Urdu is written in Arabic letters and Hindi is written in Devanagari, and since that is the only difference between the two, iconic cultural works of Pakistan, if written in Devanagari, would fairly be described as being written in Hindi -- they have all of the defining characteristic[] of Hindi and none of the defining characteristic[] of Urdu.

The existence of geographically-based variation in vocabulary and grammar, especially minor variation, doesn't make for a claim that the languages are different. In Georgia (and, so I'm led to believe, other parts of the American South, but I can speak to Georgia from personal experience) it's possible to combine modal verbs, which is grossly ungrammatical in standard American english. Using just examples from country music, it's also possible in southern dialects to use verbs that don't exist in SAE ("I ain't [...]") or to conjugate verbs in impossible ways ("He don't [...]"; "We was [...]"). There is no serious case to be made that they're not speaking english in the South, though (Jamaica would be a more interesting case).

The only other place I'm familiar with where the alphabet (term used loosely here) is held to, under its own power, define the language, is China. I actually had a dispute some weeks ago on HN with someone advancing the argument that the "Chinese language" is the writing system, and any spoken language is a dialect of "Chinese". Despite its total incoherence, this is essentially the "party line" in China, and a very common view among people educated in the Chinese school system. So here are some examples I used there:

1. If the english sentence "How old are you?" is written as 多老是你？ (pronounced "how old are you?"), english has not become a dialect of Chinese.

2. If the mandarin sentence 你多大？ is written "Ni duo da?", mandarin has not ceased to be a chinese language, nor has it become a dialect of english (or turkish, or any other language written with roman characters).

3. Considering two illiterate Chinese people, one of whom speaks mandarin and the other hakka, is it correct to say, since they're both illiterate, that neither knows any language at all?

It should be easy to see that choice of writing system is orthogonal to what the language is that's being written (or, in example 3, not written). Chinese politics dictate that different languages with 0% mutual intelligibility be made to appear "the same". What we see in Pakistan is the opposite impulse, that the same language be made to appear different for political purposes. But this has no basis in reality; Urdu and Hindi, with their 100% (!) mutual intelligibility, are the same thing. Arabic letters don't make Urdu different from Hindi any more than they make it similar to Arabic.