alt Hacker NewsThis problem is not limited to Arabic. Variants of the arabic alphabet are used by Persian (including Iranian and Dari dialects), Mazanderani, Qashqai, Luri, Gilaki, Kurdish (excluding Kurds in Turkey), Talysh, Azerbaijani (in Iran), Pamir languages, Pashto, Urdu, Balochi, Sindhi (in Pakistan), Punjabi (in Pakistan), Uzbek (in Afghanistan), Turkmen (in Afghanistan), Saraiki, Hindko, Brahui, languages spoken in Kashmir.
Whole languages are dying out because people are unable to express them properly on computers. Even popular software that dominate these speakers does not care to improve their experience. For example, Urdu has traditionally been written in the Nastaliq form [1], but is usually is rendered everywhere in the Naskh form [2]. There is no way to change this, for example, in Android without basically rooting it and changing the system fonts.
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I feel like I've never gotten a compelling explanation for why Nastaliq is hard/unavailable. I'm not an expert on abjads, but it doesn't look harder to render then Naskh (and it self-evidently is possible since the fonts exist). Does anyone here know why they make it difficult? Urdu is much less obscure than, say, Sharada or other languages with Unicode support. I think Punjabi is also often written in Nastaliq when it's not in Gurmukhi or Roman.
I don't know why people look down their noses at Arabizi
This seems an esoteric problem for the outsider.
But consider how cursive is dying out in (at least American) English, and how many centuries of writing will become unintelligible to the casual reader as a result.
All of these important cultural artifacts require maintenance.
> There is no way to change this, for example, in Android without basically rooting it and changing the system fonts.
I am really surprised Android won't let the user select their own system font. This is a huge accessibility problem, especially for dyslexics.