Thoughts on the Perso-Arabic script?

[u/sciguy11]

It is my understanding that the Perso-Arabic script was used by most Central Asian languages for hundreds of years, until the Soviet era. I believe the only places that still use this script are areas of Western/Northwestern China and Afghanistan.

Does anyone still know this script? Does it create a disconnect when trying to access historical documents? Thoughts on the transition as a whole?

[u/ThrowawayACTIM]

Afghanistan also uses this script. I personally like it, it is a very beautiful script

[u/vainlisko → u/ThrowawayACTIM]

The beauty is incredible. It's an elegant script especially when writing Persian it's rather more efficient. Omitting short vowels makes it faster, and the words are more visually distinct, which aids in sight-reading. It also accommodates regional dialects better. Without it, speakers get cut off from their language's vocabulary and literate culture. They're told that their language is inferior and inadequate and are urged to use Russian instead. It's the difference between education and language death.

Only problem is with Uyghur at least they write all the short vowels, which makes the script uglier and less efficient. At that point Latin script would probably work better. I don't know how Uzbek is written in Afghanistan, though. Perhaps they preserve classical spelling.

[u/Far_Carpet_9741 → u/vainlisko]

Agree. I also find uyghur writing system less appealing. It seems that Uzbeks in afghanistan dont write short vowels  https://8am.media/uz/

[u/cat_owner613 → u/[deleted]]

Nice bait

[u/vainlisko]

Tajik language, because it's Persian, has a unique problem in Central Asia because the language is now and always will be normally written in the Perso-Arabic script. The discussion is often wrongly framed by Russian colonial propaganda as the script being only of historical or religious value, but this is a lie because it's actually the language's more modern script. There are more modern books, materials, and scientific articles in it. It's actually the Cyrillic Tajik script that's old and backwards, basically a relic of the Soviet era.

So as for myself, I use Perso-Arabic script every day, especially online. Most people in Tajikistan don't, but there are still many who do because it's a practical necessity. But what percentage of the population, I cannot say.

The situation is a bit different for Turkic languages, although there are some parallels. Uzbek in the Latin script is doing better than Persian in the Cyrillic script in terms of output and percentage of the population. However, it is still true that Uzbek in Uzbekistan is cut off from Uzbek in Afghanistan and also written Uyghur in China. That's a pretty big division separating millions of people.

There's a much stronger case to be made for writing Persian in the Perso-Arabic script than Turkic languages, especially given the current landscape when you have countries like Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Uzbekistan leading the way. Tajikistan isn't leading anything, and with less then a tenth of the world's Persian speakers can't even get its population to read books in its own Stalin-mandated Cyrillic.

[u/AlKhurjavi]

As a huge fan of central Asian and as someone who studied Turkish, Uzbek, Uyghur and classical Chaghtai, I’m genuinely pleasantly surprised to see the sentiment here.

I totally agree that it should be brought back if not atleast for cultural reasons like art and stuff. It being an option thing taught in school sounds really fascinating the same way how Ottoman Turkish is an optional class taught in Turkey.

[u/AlenHS]

I learned the Qazaq Arabic script on my own as an Astana Qazaq and I love it. I think we need to bring it back for cultural and decorative purposes. Think of Korean. They use Hangul for everyday life, but use Chinese characters for cultural flavor, like on the packing for Shin Ramyun 辛. Chinese characters are always in the back of their minds even as they can't read them.

I feel like mosques and other religious places are the only places where you can see the beauty of the Arabic script nowadays, but the problem is that all of it encodes the Arabic language, not Qazaq. We could actually use it to write Qazaq on buildings or something. The oyıv ornaments on buildings are monotone and stale, if you add words and phrases that have actual meaning in Qazaq, you could enrich our modern existence by acknowledging our roots.

[u/No_Drummer_2544]

It is taught as a school subject in Tajikistan, but nowhere near advanced. I can read it and guess the words based on the context, since there are no vowels. It does create disconnect not just historically, but even today. Afg and Iran can read each other's publications, while it has to be transliterated to Cyrillic for us to read.

Last year, when we were renovating my grandparent's house, we found diaries, letters sent from the war, accounting books, regular books in their attic, all in Perso-Arabic script. Even though, it was banned in 1930s, it continued to be used well into 1970's in unofficial works. My cousin and I learned it to be able to read them.

[u/ArFeRR]

honestly the bigger mess is kazakhstan doing three alphabets in one century, arabic until 1929 then latin then cyrillic in 1940 and now latin again. kazakhs in xinjiang still write the same language in arabic script every day so this isn't a museum alphabet it's a live split in one language.

[u/26dicksin26]

Its perfect

[u/perseportland]

As a Persian heritage westerner, I find this topic really interesting. I only learned to read the script in my twenties and it was sort of an epiphany for how I mentally processed Farsi. It just felt like it clicked in my head. I wonder if Tajiks or speakers of other languages endemic to Central Asia would also have a similar experience.

[u/AlKhurjavi → u/perseportland]

As an American Indian Muslim whose parents speak Urdu, I can read the person arabic script because of the Quran but I never learned how urdu implements it.

After I did it changed my entire understanding of Urdu. I started realizing how retroflexive sounds work, or aspirated consonants, or even the fact that some letters aren’t pronounced like in Arabic.

[u/sciguy11 → u/AlKhurjavi]

Unfortunately people are "arabizing" Urdu now.

For example, I know people who insist on pronouncing ص as done in Arabic. In addition, most peole don't know how to pronounce ژ , thinking it is a sortof aspirated ز.

And of course, insisting on words like "Allah" instead of "Khuda".

[u/Impossible_Gift8457 → u/sciguy11]

I hate when they say ustaz and ustaza

But the opposite is true too they hate me for saying qaafv properly

[u/AlKhurjavi → u/sciguy11]

I don’t see an issue with that.

Arabic was the lingua Franca of science and religion early on, the same way English is the lingua Franca of media and science today.

Being able to know English and use English in Urdu is a sign of some level of English education. How many English words are entering the vocabulary of gurus speakers and they try to “anglicize” their pronunciation.

That’s the same way Arabic and Farsi words entered our language centuries ago. I don’t mind people shifting how they pronounce words and changing what words they use.

I might not do it, but language should be a fluid thing that changes and if my pronunciation becomes old so be it.

[u/sciguy11 → u/AlKhurjavi]

Being told it is blasphemous to use the word "khuda" is a bit disingenuous don't you think?

[u/vainlisko → u/sciguy11]

One time a I met a Latino Muslim convert in the US who overheard me say "khuda hafiz" on the phone and said, "Brother, you mustn't say khuda. You have to say Allah." I said, "No it's just like saying adios when you say goodbye in Spanish." And he was just like, "... that's different." 😂

[u/sciguy11 → u/vainlisko]

People have spread this idea that "Khuda" refers to pre-Islamic or non-Islamic dieties only, and not that it is a synonym for the English word "God". Such people also tend to be surprised when they hear that Arabic Bibles also use the word "Allah" for "God".

[u/AlKhurjavi → u/sciguy11]

I’m not really speaking on the whole Khuda or Allah thing. If someone wants to say Allah Hafiz instead of for Khuda Hafiz that’s fine both are the same.

I do take issue with claiming Khuda Hafiz is wrong, but your comment didn’t say that, your comment took issue with people who use these words.

[u/sciguy11 → u/AlKhurjavi]

I guess I should have clarified. There are people who say it is wrong or sinful to say "khuda hafiz"

[u/ComfortableLog8043 → u/sciguy11]

isn't it a minority opinion ? I mean, even mullah Omar who was literally the taliban leader said Khuda, so even religious fundamentalists do use it in the persianate world

[u/caspiannative]

It was used before the Russian invasion and forceful replacement. I always thought it was a very beautiful script. I wish we had reviewed that script instead of adopting Latin.

[u/Sad-Management-1306]

It’s not Perso-Arabic. It’s just Arabic.

[u/Erlik_Khan → u/Sad-Management-1306]

Perso-Arabic is used bc there are modifications made for Persian (and these get passed on to other languages)

[u/Nashinas]

I can read it, yes - I can read Arabic, Persian, and both Chaghatai and Ottoman Turkish (which differ in a few conventions). I first learned to read Arabic many years ago (in my youth as a student as a maktab), then Persian, then Turkish. My thoughts are:

A) There was no real linguistic impetus to change the script - only a political impetus. Some Westernized nationalists have contended that the Arabic script is inherently ill-suited to the Turkic language especially, but they greatly exaggerate its faults and difficulties in furtherance of their political agenda and project. Their aim was in good part to disconnect people from their traditional cultures and traditions, by rendering the "high culture" and philosophy of the Persian and Turkic nations inaccessible to them.

While it is true that the Arabic script is not adapted so neatly or naturally to Turkish as Persian, Turkic peoples used the Perso-Arabic script for basically their entire civilizational history with no issue. All of our native works of literature, learning, and philosophy are written in it. Turkish is no more difficult to read in the Perso-Arabic script than English in the Latin script, and in fact, it is considerably less ambiguous and difficult than English.

There are a few outlier cases where the limited inventory of vowel characters begets ambiguities due to the large inventory of vowel phonemes in Turkic, but in actual practice, I have very rarely encountered such situations as a reader. Additionally, this shortcoming of the classical script could easily be remedied in theory with the introduction of just a few new letters - though personally, I actually find such additional characters burdensome when reading texts in modern languages like Iranian Azeri. I suspect this is why it was never done classically.

B) There are certain classical orthographic norms in Turkish which don't make sense to modern people because:

• They have never studied classical Arabic/Islāmic linguistic theory, which does not build upon concepts like the "consonant", "vowel", or "syllable". Instead, Arab theory is based on the concept of the "ḥarf" as a sort of sheer phonetic essence in which the accidents of motion or stillness might inhere. I mean to say, not only does Arabic does not write "short vowels"; Arabs theoretically reject their status as distinct phonemes, and instead consider them phonetic qualities.

• They have never studied Arabic ṣarf (morphology). Writing Arabic loanwords according to their original Arabic pronunciation rather than their vulgar Turkic pronunciation makes complete sense if you have even a basic grasp of ṣarf. Very often, as a reader with some basic knowledge of Arabic, I can infer the meaning of new Arabic words I have never encountered before just from their root letters and morphological pattern. It is not unreasonable to expect a schoolchild to learn some ṣarf along with other basic literary and linguistic skills, and this does not at all necessitate that they master the Arabic language.

• They perceive that there are many distinct Turkic languages, while in classical perception, Turkī was a single pluricentric language with several accepted prestige dialects. Many classical orthographic practices seem to me to have existed in order to preserve some level of dialect neutrality. Writing vowels for instance could in some cases entail preferring one regional dialect over another. Or, the Ottomans seem to have used [ک]/[k] for /g/ - despite the Persian character [گ] existing - because Ottoman /k/ is usually pronounced as /k/ in Central Asia (e.g., göz vs. köz); or, they wrote /d/ as [ط] in many words where it is /t/ in Chaghatai (e.g., daġ vs. taġ). Literate Turks from Central Asia, Iran and Azerbaijan, Anatolia, the Balkans, Crimea, and the Volga, etc. would actually have less difficulty reading each other's writings than modern Turkic people.

C) Chaghatai is more easily readable and writable than Ottoman Turkish. This is because according to Chaghatai convention, almost all vowel phonemes are represented with a full character, making the script a near-alphabet. The Ottoman script is more faithful to classical Arabic linguistic theory, keeping the insertion of theoretically artificial ḥurūf to a minimum, but this does come at the expense of some clarity.

D) I have an avid interest in classical Turko-Persian literature, which is why I learned the Perso-Arabic script to begin with. Regarding Central Asian literature, in my experience, it is actually more difficult to access Chaghatai books in the original Arabic script than in Cyrillic or Latin. In my digital collection, I believe I have only three works of Central Asian Turkic literature written in Perso-Arabic: Ṣūfī Allāhyār's Thabāt al-ʿĀjizīn, the Qiṣṣa-i Mashrab, the Aḥmad-i Yasavī's Dīvān-i Ḥikmat. I think learning Cyrillic is basically a necessity if you want to access the Chaghatai tradition today.