Another wrinkle with Arabic is linguistic conservatism. Due to Islamism and the idea that Arabic is the language of of God (the Quran was written in Arabic by the supposedly illiterate prophet), Arabic has lagged behind other languages in terms of innovation.

Hebrew is a closely related semitic language that simply adopted a block and cursive form. It has also been greatly simplified and friendlier towards loanwords, which has made it far easier to learn.

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hackpelican 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Muslims don’t believe Arabic is the language of God. They believe that the Quran was revealed in Arabic (true). Thinking the creator of the heavens and earth only speaks one language is absurd. It also kind of implies that Muslims believe in a superiority of Arabs which is also not true.

Weird to say Arabic hasn’t innovated or evolved considering the wild variety of dialects spoken in the modern world.

Conflating the language with the script is also bizarre. In terms of adapting Arabic to technology, look into romanized Arabic which was used before Unicode was common.

	▲	slibhb 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I didn't write "God only speaks Arabic" in Islam. That's your intepretation of my post. All I meant was that Arabic has special status in Islam. > Weird to say Arabic hasn’t innovated or evolved considering the wild variety of dialects spoken in the modern world. I didn't say Arabic has not innovated or evolved; only that it "has lagged behind other languages in terms of innovation". My belief is that that is due to linguistic conservatism, and linked to Islamism (or, at minimum, the centrality of Islam in Arab culture). Also related to this is the existence of Fusha, its place in Arab culture, and its branding as "modern standard Arabic". I didn't conflate anything. While a script and a language are not the same, it's not a coincidence that Arabic is often written today in a script that is very close to Quranic script. And -- to really kick the hornet's nest -- it's also not a coincidence that there have been so few outstanding Arab writers (in Arabic) in the past 100 years. One novelist and a couple poets.

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nwhnwh an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Twitter trolls are on HN now?

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aaa_aaa an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

This is such a bad take on the issue.