The Lebanese Architect Who Tried to Simplify Arabic for the Typewriter
Unified Arabic
In 1932, Lebanese architect Nasri Khattar realized that Arabic's many letterforms could be reduced without losing legibility, leading to his Unified Arabic project. Supported by IBM and the Ford Foundation, it aimed to combat illiteracy by making Arabic easier to type and learn. Despite prototypes and endorsements, it faced resistance from those who saw the calligraphic script as essential to Arab identity, and was eventually overtaken by digital technology.
I am going to stake my reputation as a literacy man: I believe that, using this alphabet, the illiterate will learn in one-tenth the time that it now takes; and that means that probably ten times as many people will learn to read.
- musictubes
My biggest problem letter is mim. It essentially disappears in a lot of styles. If I was more fluent I’m sure I’d recognize the words more readily and know when to look for it. I don’t find the rest of the letters too difficult even at my basic level.
I was struck by the lack of books in the homes of even educated people in Yemen. I once went to a book fair in Sana’a that was well attended. Think it was on a college campus. I don’t remember seeing many novels in Arabic, they were mostly in English and French. I had been told that if someone sent me any books in the mail they would have to be cleared by the censor before I would get them. That pretty much equated to never getting them. The book fair was a relief. I picked up David Copperfield and Women in Love and that was enough to last me until I made a trip out of the country.
- TFNA
Efforts to reform Arabic script made more sense decades ago when illiteracy was high. But once the internet came along, the young people across the Arabic-speaking world who might have once been illiterate, took to literacy very keenly: you had to be at least at little literate to SMS with friends, access internet porn, and get sweet dopamine hits on social media. Suddenly Arabic script turned out not to be that big of a problem after all.
- BrandiATMuhkuh
One of the hardest thing for me when reading Arabic is to identify the start and end of letters. I have started using monospace Arabic font with little gaps. Works great. https://github.com/eliheuer/hasubi-mono