From the New York Times: An Effort to Make Arabic Easier.
The hurdles of learning Arabic as a second language are daunting. Arabic is written right to left, and each letter can take one of four forms, depending on where it appears in a word. Finally, Arabic is printed and written only in flowing script, never as individual letters.
Those obstacles can be overwhelming for students of the language - and for computer programmers trying to render Arabic characters on screen - at a time when there is a critical need for clear communication between the West and the Arabic-speaking world. In fact, it can be a challenge even for some native Arabic speakers to learn to read and write in their mother tongue. That is what led Saad D. Abulhab to patent a simplified Arabic alphabet that he says is easier to learn.
"The whole thing came about because my 6-year-old daughter did not want to learn to read Arabic because she said it was written backwards," said Mr. Abulhab, an Iraqi-American who was born in California and spent his childhood in Baghdad. He earned a master's degree in library science and is now director of technology at the Newman Library of Baruch College in New York. He lives with his family in Milford, Conn.
"That gave me the idea to make it bidirectional, with letters that went both ways but didn't lose their characteristics," he said. "It's your choice how to use them. Like with Chinese, which was originally written top to bottom but now is written mainly left to right by many young Chinese." [continue]
Interesting idea. I'd rather learn the regular Arabic script, though, wouldn't you? Start with the Arabic alphabet, and then move on to stuff like the Arabic alphabet song Whee! (Flash required for Arabic alphabetic fun.)
Posted on March 14, 2004 11:04 PM. Filed under: language.