Should We Start Using Latin Alphabet to Write Arabic?
As blasphemous as it might sound, in reality, a great number of people already extensively use English letters to communicate in Arabic through IM, email, SMS, Facebook, twitter, you name it. The voices that do not exist in Arabic such as 3ain and 9ad are replaced by letters and it is almost understood universally now by Arabic speakers that these numbers represent the voices they are meant to replace.
The crazy thing is that this idea was suggested more than 60 years ago by a Lebanese Poet called Saeed Aqil to have Arabic written in the Latin alphabet. Aqil argued that this change would make Arabic accessible to those who can read the letters. Aqil was also in support of having accents such as Lebanese become regarded as independent languages which are taught in the same exact way they are spoken as it made no sense to him to teach classical Arabic that nobody used in real life.
In a similar fashion to Turkish, Aqil created new Latin letters shapes to write down new voices:
The majority of Arabic speakers are Muslims and would reject any suggestion to play around with Arabic as it is hte language in which the Quran would written, but as one article suggests, affecting the script in which the language is written would not necessarily affect the way Quran is actually written. In fact, the purpose of the new language is to make Arabic be read exactly the way it sounds, but with Latin letters. It should also be remembered that Arabic was not written in the same exact way we do now when the prophet Mohammed lived and major new concepts such as tanqeet were only added years after the death of the prophet.
I read an article that was in support of Akil’s Arabic and which claimed that Arabic letters are ugly and unbalanced, unlike the Latin alphabet i which each letter could be contained within a defined box. I don’t agree with that, I think Arabic calligraphy is beautiful, and even if it was harder to decipher due to the transformation of the shape of the letter depending on its location in the word, that adds to the sophistication of the language.
It should be remembered that Aqil’s suggestion was made in an era were Arabic there were great disputes as to how digitalization of the Arabic language could be achieved.
It is funny though that some books were actually printed in the 60s and 70s using Aqil’s Arabic in Latin alphabet. It sounds bizarre, the comparable concept in English would be writing a whole book in TXT speech.
I just thought this topic amusing, especially because in reality many people type all of their Arabic in Latin letters.
