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It's a silly statement. Type, composed of little chunks of metal placed adjacent to each other, has a problem with scripts that aren't practically decomposable into little chunks placed adjacent to each other. But that's equally true of ‘western’ cursives and equally false of ‘eastern’ non-cursives, including Semitic scripts like Hebrew and Ethiopic, as well as South Arabian¹, which would have been perfectly suited to type but was displaced by the cursive Arabic script.

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




uhm, you do realize South Arabian alphabet was last in active use more than a thousand years ago. It now bears no resemblance to modern Arabic type. At all.

I'm reading your argument as suggesting that over a quarter billion Arabic native speakers should have learned a new script? Not sure if that was sarcastic. Either way, if you are making this argument, it is easier for these speakers to learn English instead..


The point is that the practicality of movable type for a script has nothing to do with whether or not the script is ‘western’.




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