Optical correction in Arabic monoline

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  • Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian
    Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian Posts: 2,044
    edited March 2017
    >  If I pair a Kufic style with a Latin design I would go for black letter because it signifies the same historical image

    To me that's too historicist. What matters is how readers today are likely to perceive kufic and blackletter. When Latin and Arabic are paired, it matters most how Arab/Persian readers perceive kufic and blackletter...

    > There could be cultural reasons why designers in Arab world are accepting reverse contrast as a new normal contrast but I can tell you it's not modernity.

    Like most cases of Latinization, it arises from an inferiority complex, from wanting to be Western, because that's where political power currently resides. Some time in the future we will have a problem with Arabic looking too Chinese.  :-)

    > the users see the Latin and it looks normal to them so they assume the Arabic is also at its normal contrast direction.

    Most end-users of such systems being Arab/Persian, it does not seem "normal", but it does seem progressive. Western clients commissioning such designs are either being very astute in making money at any cost, or are indeed simply ignorant... for which they usually need "help" from Arab/Persian designers.

    > Because words are made from connected chunks and they are interpreted differently.

    To me that's superficial, and arguably arising from a black-centric mentality. A word shape is an interplay of black and white; it does mean tight spacing is more important in Arabic than Latin, but what's touching is secondary.

    I think reverse-contrast (just like any formal feature) cannot be blindly migrated between writing systems, mostly because of perceptual bias. For example in Arabic it says things it doesn't in Latin: it looks much more unconventional, plus it says "I'm Western". Youthful desperation causes many Arab/Persian designers (and Armenian, and Thai...) to sacrifice the deeper meanings of forms.
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,191
    To me that's superficial, and arguably arising from a black-centric mentality. A word shape is an interplay of black and white; it does mean tight spacing is more important in Arabic than Latin, but what's touching is secondary.

    But it's not about 'touching', is it? It's about graphotactics, about changes in the shapes of letters dependent on sequence and their fusion into groups. I understand Bahman's point to be that these groups need to be recognisable — as words or as constituent parts of words — and the graphotactical behaviour and fusion creates a level of cognitive complexity above that of a sequence of disconnected letters of unchanging form as in (most) Latin script text. I don't see how saying 'a word shape is an interplay of black and white' in any way invalidates Bahman's observation; indeed, it is precisely because changing the modulation pattern alters the interplay of black and white that it can be a challenge to recognition, regardless of whether one believes that the unit of recognition is the letter, the group, or the whole word.
  • Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian
    Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian Posts: 2,044
    edited March 2017
    > fusion creates a level of cognitive complexity above that of a sequence of disconnected letters of unchanging form as in (most) Latin script text.

    I don't believe that's true. I believe a reader of English also fuses letters into clusters (boumas) as much as possible, but simply using the white much more. And although English is far less complex than Arabic in terms of formal construction, the binocular versus monocular "g" complexity for example is nonetheless taken in stride by readers. Yes, there's a difference, but is not qualitative. I doubt Arabic readers have a problem with words that don't connect* (as long as spacing is tight).

    * For example: واوي

    > regardless of whether one believes that the unit of recognition is the letter, the group, or the whole word.

    I think this does actually affect the belief in complexity we're talking about. People who believe all reading is a [parallel] compilation of letterforms will believe that Arabic is qualitatively more complex to read. I don't.
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,191
    edited March 2017
    I don't believe that's true. I believe a reader of English also fuses letters into clusters (boumas) as much as possible

    You're talking about cognitive clustering. I'm talking about graphotactical fusion, i.e. the actual modification and joining together of letters into groups on the page according to their sequence. You're talking about a perceptual process. I'm talking about the object of perception.

    I doubt Arabic readers have a problem with words that don't connect* (as long as spacing is tight).

    I didn't suggest that they would have a problem with words that don't connect. Indeed, I am saying that the fusion patterns produced by Arabic graphotactics are more complex than as simple sequence of unchanging and unconnected letters à la Latin. It is one of the decently established conclusions of reading studies that graphical complexity slows down reading. Nadine told me about one study of bilingual Israeli Arabs, who were found to read Hebrew faster than they read Arabic, even though the latter was typically their first language.

    So potentially a word like واوي is easier to recognise than a word made up of one or more fusions. But of course this is in the context of an overall reading system in which fusions are frequent, and the relationship of fused and unfused letters also contribute to patterns constituting words.

    In Arabic, there are sequences like the lam+mim combination in which, in some sequences and some text styles, one of the letters a) becomes little more than a vestigial stub, and b) is visually positioned such that a top-to-bottom reading direction becomes more important than the typical left-to-right. That's a graphical complexity that needs to be unpacked and then learned as a distinctive pattern representing the same combination of letters that, in a different sequence, has a completely different form. That variability within the Arabic graphotactical system simply is more complex than anything in Latin text.

    What I am suggesting, following Bahman's lead, is that introducing atypical modulation patterns into a more complex system that already requires learning to recognise more, and more kinds of combinations of shapes, is likely to cause more disruption than introducing such modulation into relatively simple reading systems of repeated, disconnected shapes.

    [Nota: by 'shape' I do mean the arrangement of form and space, not just the form, I'm with you on that.]

    People who believe all reading is a [parallel] compilation of letterforms will believe that Arabic is qualitatively more complex to read. I don't.

    I don't think one needs to believe that in order to recognise that Arabic is qualitatively more complex. It is quantitively more complex, and quantitative complexity has qualitative impact. Nadine's doctorate looked at relative complexity within Arabic, and also found that there was a measurable deficit, in terms of more regressions, depending on the complexity of script. This really shouldn't surprise anyone. Indeed, I would have thought you — with your belief in the ability of type design to improve readability — would be quicker to point to such deficits than I am, with my general confidence in readerability.
  • Bahman Eslami
    Bahman Eslami Posts: 73
    Hrant:
    I believe a reader of English also fuses letters into clusters (boumas) as much as possible, but simply using the white much more. And although English is far less complex than Arabic in terms of formal construction, the binocular versus monocular "g" complexity for example is nonetheless taken in stride by readers. Yes, there's a difference, but is not qualitative. I doubt Arabic readers have a problem with words that don't connect.
    I think I'm about to go a bit off topic here but this subject is triggering more related subjects. I have to preface that when you say Arabic is more complex it's true if you want to disassemble the shapes and categorize them in your type systems. But I don't think Arabic is complex the way an orientalist looks at it. The Latin script is made of solid blocks and you tend to analyze the Arabic with that approach. Disassembling shapes to solid shapes. How do you know brain reads like that? I think there should be more research on how Arab/Persian readers perceive text. I see Arabic/Persian words as combination of letters + connections, the form of connections is contextual and also letterforms have variants but you also have different graphemes per letter like caps and lowercase. The letters by itself are not complex in Arabic. Hand tries to find shortest path to next letter and it doesn't lift from paper and writes this path as a connection and this makes it look complex to you. The connections at the end make a terminal form suggesting the word has ended. It's about a perspective if something is complex or not,

    And about bouma there has been researches that shows bouma does not contribute to legibility as it was thought before. I'm quoiting Kevin Larson here:

    Woodworth in the 1930s reported that people were faster at reading lowercase text than uppercase text, but I don't think the topic had been closely studied until the Arditi work. I would tend to trust the Arditi research that uppercase text is read faster even when it is made smaller by adjusting to 2x threshold size.

    The word shape of all caps does not differ much except in length. How this could be explained? 


    It is one of the decently established conclusions of reading studies that graphical complexity slows down reading. Nadine told me about one study of bilingual Israeli Arabs, who were found to read Hebrew faster than they read Arabic, even though the latter was typically their first language.
    I hope that in Nadine's mentioned research those bilingual Israeli Arabs read both text equally so they are equally familiar with both languages and texts.

    So potentially a word like واوي is easier to recognise than a word made up of one or more fusions.
    In Arabic, there are sequences like the lam+mim combination in which, in some sequences and some text styles, one of the letters a) becomes little more than a vestigial stub, and b) is visually positioned such that a top-to-bottom reading direction becomes more important than the typical left-to-right. That's a graphical complexity that needs to be unpacked and then learned as a distinctive pattern representing the same combination of letters that, in a different sequence, has a completely different form. That variability within the Arabic graphotactical system simply is more complex than anything in Latin text.

    I'm not sure about that either. Me as a reader of Persian text tend to cache words as combination of some shapes. I don't think we decompose words into letters, we just see the combination of some "closed shapes" and it is registered to a word in my head. If I remove the dots I still can read most of the text because of context. It's amazing. If I remove the space I still can read most of the text too because the start and end of word shapes are defined in Arabic.
    Of course if I see a new word I need to look closer and see what letters are there but you as Latin reader would have troubles with new words too. This whole idea of decomposing words into letters during the reading process I think is misleading and creates conclusions that might not be correct for other scripts. In Latin words are decomposed into letters because letters are closed shapes, in Arabic grapheme fusions are the recognizable shapes.
    What I am suggesting, following Bahman's lead, is that introducing atypical modulation patterns into a more complex system that already requires learning to recognise more, and more kinds of combinations of shapes, is likely to cause more disruption than introducing such modulation into relatively simple reading systems of repeated, disconnected shapes.
    That could be right that teaching complex writing styles in Arabic could be hard but this is also because the teaching method had made it hard. In calligraphy if you teach every combination then we end up with lots of shapes that need to be registered as part of words but I'm still not sure if brain reads like a machine and if we have more number of combinations then we read harder. We tend to register word shapes, so more new words makes it harder. If you have a larger repository of word shape in mind you can read faster. This has been proved that the higher the education the faster you read.

    Nadine's doctorate looked at relative complexity within Arabic, and also found that there was a measurable deficit, in terms of more regressions, depending on the complexity of script. This really shouldn't surprise anyone.

    Kudos to Nadine but I have to read this research to believe this because from what I've gathered from her designs the research is supporting her previous approach in Arabic Type Design too which has a tendency to lower the glyphs and variations of letters, because Latin script is like that which I think is another approach in Latinizing Arabic script. Take a look at Helvetica Arabic to see what I'm talking about. I would believe if a researcher is not biased or has a tendency to support superiority of Latin to Arabic script.

  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,126
    If Arabic takes longer to read than Hebrew, or presumably English, when people reading English tend to read English words as a single unit, taking advantage of the general shape of a word as indicated by letters with ascenders and descenders in lower-case, what could be the cause?

    I can think of three factors that may help to provide an explanation.

    The first is that when reading, in English or Arabic, while one may read the most common and familiar words as a unit, there will also be other words that one is reading on a letter-by-letter basis. So, in both scripts, words have boumas, but when the letters are connected, letter-by-letter reading, which is still resorted to occasionally, is slower.

    The second is that whatever the language, it is expressed in printing in different typefaces. The overall shape of words is affected by the typeface used, and the reader will need time to adjust to a given document before using word shapes to accelerate, which again means that the ease of letter-by-letter reading becomes a significant factor.

    The third is that many English words have distinctive shapes because of a unique pattern of ascenders and descenders in lower-case. In the case of Arabic, not only is there a reduced distinctiveness of the letters, particularly in their initial or medial forms, but the larger letters that affect the shape are usually the ones in the final or isolated forms. So distinctiveness in overall word shape largely comes from the points in the word where there are breaks in the script-like connection from one letter to the next.

    It also doesn't help that typesetting systems designed around Western languages, in addition to being utterly unable to cope with the Nastaliq script used for Urdu and Farsi, also stripped the Naksh script used for Arabic of one of its significant sources of distinctiveness in word shapes.
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,191
    when people reading English tend to read English words as a single unit, taking advantage of the general shape of a word as indicated by letters with ascenders and descenders in lower-case

    That is not how cognitive scientists now believe that we read.
  • Em Karimifar
    Em Karimifar Posts: 11
    >  If I pair a Kufic style with a Latin design I would go for black letter because it signifies the same historical image
    To me that's too historicist. What matters is how readers today are likely to perceive kufic and blackletter. When Latin and Arabic are paired, it matters most how Arab/Persian readers perceive kufic and blackletter...

    ٌHrant, I believe When Latin & Arabic are paired it matters how Arab/Persian and Latin readers—equally—perceive Kufic & Blackletter! 

    Latinized Arabic has been advertised as Kufic style but it has nothing to do with it.

    They certainly mean square Kufic style which is very geometric, the only script they found to relate their bastardized typefaces to!   

  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,191
    edited March 2017
    They certainly mean square Kufic style

    I've quite regularly heard the term neo-Kufic used to refer to typographic letters with large counters, rationalised vertical alignments, and usually fairly low contrast stroke modulation. They're not necessarily geometric, and they're distinct from square Kufic, which is really a decorative system of applying text to a grid, rather than a style of script.

    The terminology of Arabic typography is problematic. Terms like neo-Naskh and neo-Kufic are really inadequate: they are not well defined or generally agreed upon, and they reference classical scripts in the most superficial ways. So, for instance, the term neo-Naskh references a very specific classical style, while sharing only some similarities of individual letter construction and stroke modulation. The term neo-Kufic is even more inadequate, since the term Kufic is applied to a number of historical styles with quite different characteristics (leaving aside disagreements among palaeographers about the use of the term).
  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,126
    John Hudson said:

    That is not how cognitive scientists now believe that we read.
    That may be. But my argument is that even if bouma played a significant role in reading, there could be reasons for difficulty in reading the Arabic script.

    Obviously, the individual letters must be important; if one takes a sample of English text, and blurs it so that only the bouma is visible, it becomes unreadable. But it's also true that lower-case reads better than upper-case, despite the latter being more legible, which would seem to indicate bouma is significant.

    The question of how much significance is properly allocated to bouma is a complicated and difficult one, and I only have a very limited acquaintance with the facts involved; thus, I felt unprepared to wade into a debate with Hrant over that issue.
  • Em Karimifar
    Em Karimifar Posts: 11
    I've quite regularly heard the term neo-Kufic used to refer to typographic letters with large counters, rationalised vertical alignments, and usually fairly low contrast stroke modulation. They're not necessarily geometric, and they're distinct from square Kufic, which is really a decorative system of applying text to a grid, rather than a style of script.

    Interesting! I didn't know anything about neo-Naskh and neo-Kufic and by doing a quick search couldn't find any documentation for them as calligraphic scripts. You're right, they even seem to be made-up terms!

    Yes, square Kufic is pure geometry used in architectural ornaments, I agree it's not a script but just a system. However, my point is that those designers are sugar coating their designs by relating them to geometric Kufic while they're actually based on the Latin stroke modulation. 

  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,191
    I didn't know anything about neo-Naskh and neo-Kufic and by doing a quick search couldn't find any documentation for them as calligraphic scripts.

    The terms are limited to typography, and refer to fonts that mimic aspects of Naskh or 'Kufic' while failing to implement the actual systems of those scripts. At least in the context of neo-Naskh the design choices are fairly predictable, based on a long practice of forcing Arabic script into western technological constraints (limited number of forms and connection types, linear layout—what Tom Milo calls 'Eurabic'). By calling these neo-Naskh typographers can pretend that they're the result of stylistic innovation rather than inadequate technologies. Neo-Kufic is more problematic for the reasons stated above. Unlike Naskh, which is a very specific calligraphic style, the term Kufic is applied to a variety of early styles.
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,888
    John Savard said:

    Obviously, the individual letters must be important; if one takes a sample of English text, and blurs it so that only the bouma is visible, it becomes unreadable. But it's also true that lower-case reads better than upper-case, despite the latter being more legible, which would seem to indicate bouma is significant.
    Lowercase being more legible than uppercase can also be explained by the letter shapes being, individually, more distinctive. The question has been specifically investigated, btw—the exact way you are asking it above. Came to the conclusion that word shape was not contributing much.
    John Savard said:

    The question of how much significance is properly allocated to bouma is a complicated and difficult one, and I only have a very limited acquaintance with the facts involved; thus, I felt unprepared to wade into a debate with Hrant over that issue.
    Even that exact question has been specifically investigated: the relative contribution of word shape and letter shapes. I believe it came out about 75% to 25% or something like that.

    For Hrant, my challenge is this: design an experiment that could potentially falsify the primacy of word shape in immersive reading, whose outcome would show quite different results if the contribution of parallel letter recognition was the primary factor in word recognition (as cognitive psychologists doing reading today believe). That is, come up with an experiment that you predict would come out one way, your opponents predict would come out a different way, and if it came out that other way, you would accept that they appeared to be correct.
  • Bahman Eslami
    Bahman Eslami Posts: 73
    If Arabic takes longer to read than Hebrew, or presumably English, when people reading English tend to read English words as a single unit, taking advantage of the general shape of a word as indicated by letters with ascenders and descenders in lower-case, what could be the cause?
    There is no scientific evidence to support your hypothesis. I'm just shocked how many designers without much knowledge of Arabic script are considering the Arabic writing system complex or harder to read or make assumptions that Arabic should be larger next to Latin to be as readable. Please stop making assumptions until you can read it and have proof!

    There hasn't been an unbiased research on Arabic legibility yet and the methods on how a letter is legible or illegible are Latin centric. I know this could be hard to believe for you but people who regularly read Arabic script might read Latin slower even if they do it on day to day basis. I read English considerably more than Persian but still I can scan a Persian text much faster. I'm available for testing! ;)

    but when the letters are connected, letter-by-letter reading, which is still resorted to occasionally, is slower.
    Strongly disagree! Brain recognizes patterns. It doesn't matter if it's connected or not or if it's a letter or not. It just takes some patterns and associates it with a sound or an abstract concept. After a while you become used to certain patterns and you just read the word without decomposing it to letters. You swallow the whole pattern without realizing what it is made of. The pattern could be made form different shapes. In your script the patterns are individual letters. That's probably so hard for you to see why we can read Persian/Arabic text fast enough without decomposing letters because you're used to your own way of reading. We're talking about cognitive psychology here and it's a very elusive subject and very dependent on different factors. Even it has been proved that you can create misleading scientific results with statistics.

    It also doesn't help that typesetting systems designed around Western languages, in addition to being utterly unable to cope with the Nastaliq script used for Urdu and Farsi, also stripped the Naksh script used for Arabic of one of its significant sources of distinctiveness in word shapes.

    Please don't confuse implementation of writing systems with reading. If Arabic writing doesn't fit with western methods of type systems it doesn't mean it's inherently complex to comprehend for its own natives. Before making assumptions about the script please learn the script and read it and see how you perceive the words.

    Right now we're desinging a Latin/Arabic typeface with a colleague of mine. He's designing the Latin and I'm desinging the Arabic. It's very interesting that all the time he perceives Arabic as smaller and I perceive the Latin smaller. It's just about what is our reading bias that defines what is the right proportions. There shouldn't be any 'one to one' proportion similarity in neither of the scripts when they are designed simultaneously. Otherwise it becomes a compromise for one of them.

    The third is that many English words have distinctive shapes because of a unique pattern of ascenders and descenders in lower-case. In the case of Arabic, not only is there a reduced distinctiveness of the letters, particularly in their initial or medial forms, but the larger letters that affect the shape are usually the ones in the final or isolated forms. So distinctiveness in overall word shape largely comes from the points in the word where there are breaks in the script-like connection from one letter to the next.
    It's again confusing type design with cognitive activity. Words are not seen like the way you're describing here. This could be surprise for you but there is no final, initial, medial form in Arabic script. This is just an implementation method in western type systems. We read the script by recognizing the grapheme fusions. It's hard to explain here but I think I really need to come up with illustrations and show how patterns are made in the script to show it explicitly that there is so many incorrect conclusions in this discussion about Arabic script.
  • Nina Stössinger
    Nina Stössinger Posts: 151
    Bahman Eslami said:

    After a while you become used to certain patterns and you just read the word without decomposing it to letters. You swallow the whole pattern without realizing what it is made of.

    Thank you for the perspective, Bahman!
    I’m curious: Do you think something roughly analogous to this sort of scrambled (but readable) text making the rounds a little while ago (“it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are”…) would work in Arabic or Persian? Do you know of any similar attempts?
  • Bahman Eslami
    Bahman Eslami Posts: 73
    edited March 2017
    Nina it's not possible to do it in a same way. Because what you're doing in Latin is reordering the letters and they are not contextual. If I reorder the letters in Arabic their shape change and the whole pattern becomes different. In more abstract way of describing it you're reordering patterns but in Arabic it would also change the nature of pattern.
  • Nina Stössinger
    Nina Stössinger Posts: 151
    Ok gotcha, thanks for clearing that up. This is all mighty interesting, I wish more of the readability research was not so Latin-centric (or maybe there is and I just don’t know it?)
  • Khaled Hosny
    Khaled Hosny Posts: 289
    edited March 2017
    I think this is the study John Hudson mentioned: http://iipdm.haifa.ac.il/images/publications/Zohar_Eviatar/AbdelhadiIbrahim&Eviatar2011.pdf

    I haven’t read it fully yet, but I’d be very skeptical for any study that makes any conclusions based on using Times New Roman for Arabic and Tahoma for Hebrew. If anything, it just proves that so-called “simplified Arabic” designs are bad for reading, which we all know already (I hope) and that Times New Roman has such unreadable Arabic part.
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,191
    This could be surprise for you but there is no final, initial, medial form in Arabic script. This is just an implementation method in western type systems.
    Amen.
  • Craig Eliason
    Craig Eliason Posts: 1,436
    Bahman Eslami said:
    Right now we're desinging a Latin/Arabic typeface with a colleague of mine. He's designing the Latin and I'm desinging the Arabic. It's very interesting that all the time he perceives Arabic as smaller and I perceive the Latin smaller. It's just about what is our reading bias that defines what is the right proportions
    That's fascinating!
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,191
    Khaled, I'd not seen that paper before. It seems mostly to deal with perception of vowels in vocalised text. In the conclusion there is a reference to an earlier study, which I think is the one that Nadine told me about:

    The present results, together with our previous findings that native Arabic speakers process the Hebrew orthography more easily than Arabic orthography, converge to suggest that visual complexity is a major determinant of reading in Arabic. Here, we have shown that vowels are more difficult to detect in Arabic than in Hebrew, and that even by sixth grade, reading is not automatized to the point that lexical knowledge can facilitate detection. 

    With regard to using Times New Roman and Tahoma, there is a long tradition in cognitive psychology of using really bad typeface choices in studies. I suppose one could argue that this provides for a baseline consistency across studies.  :#
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,191
    Nina it's not possible to do it in a same way. Because what you're doing in Latin is reordering the letters and they are not contextual. If I reorder the letters in Arabic their shape change and the whole pattern becomes different. In more abstract way of describing it you're reordering patterns but in Arabic it would also change the nature of pattern.

    It would likely also result in a different word or a pattern that suggests a different word. The lack of vowels in most written Arabic and Persian makes letter jumbling much more confusing than in English (the meme to which Nina referred made careful use of English syllabic patterning in the sequence of consonant and vowel letters, rather than being randomly jumbled, which is one reason it is generally considered a hoax: letter order does matter). In Arabic — I don't know enough about Persian to comment — most words are based on three-letter roots, so if you jumble the letters the chances of coming up with something that suggests a different word is pretty high.
  • Khaled Hosny
    Khaled Hosny Posts: 289
    John Hudson said:
    Khaled, I'd not seen that paper before. It seems mostly to deal with perception of vowels in vocalised text. In the conclusion there is a reference to an earlier study, which I think is the one that Nadine told me about:
    I picked this one because it was all over the news in 2010 like this BBC article, it wasn’t published by then though. Other papers by the same author are here.
  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,126
    Bahman Eslami said:
    This could be surprise for you but there is no final, initial, medial form in Arabic script. This is just an implementation method in western type systems.

    Yes, I did oversimplify. There are two different forms, a large one and a small one, of most letters in the Arabic alphabet. The large form is used at the end of a word, and when a letter is not connected to the following letter of a word.

    For typesetting Arabic with cold metal type slugs, it was necessary to cast four forms of each letter so as to get the connections between the letters right; but a typewriter only needs the two basic forms.

    I also noted, in the part you quoted, that compromises for Western typesetting have made Arabic less legible: what I was specifically referring to is that the letters kha, haa, and jiim, when in the middle of a word, should properly cause the line of writing to drop down, but as this would require extra effort to accommodate, instead the letters have just been distorted so this can be avoided.
  • Sahar Afshar
    Sahar Afshar Posts: 6
    edited March 2017
    The fact that horizontal strokes are heavier in the Arabic script isn't the arbitrary decision of a scribe, it's a part of the twelve principles of Arabic Calligraphy that were developed over many years by master calligraphers like Ibn Muqlah and Ibn Bawwab. One of these is contrast, and the distribution of thicks and thins (قوت و ضعف) in Arabic letterforms. According to this, horizontal lines are thicker in Arabic to achieve the optimum level of beauty (which of course one could argue is not absolute), but also to direct the eye forward when reading the script, in the same way that serifs do in the Latin script. The latter point also ties in with another principle, which states that the process of reading should be made as effortless as possible. Maybe you could argue that these points can all be challenged, but then they have been used for hundreds of years, and native readers have grown accustomed to seeing heavier horizontal strokes in the Arabic script. It goes back to Zuzana Licko's point of "We read best what we read most." And if you subscribe to that school of thought, you'll understand that many native readers have a negative reaction to the idea of reverse contrast in an Arabic typeface. 

    I should also point out that as a bilingual, native reader of both the Arabic and Latin scripts, I read both with equal measures of ease, the only time I struggle with either is when I'm reading in a language that is not English or Persian. If I know what a word means, I can read it on paper without any extra effort, regardless of script. Complexity is relative, and to me, there isn't anything more complicated about the Arabic script. As Bahman pointed out, I don't read words in the Arabic script letter by letter, but conceive them as a whole and also by context. I would however go much slower and indeed, read letter by letter if I was trying to read a text in Arabic or Urdu. 
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,191
    Somewhat as an aside:

    There have been a lot of assertions in this thread about how we — collectively or as individuals — read. I think it is important to restate what should be obvious, given that competent, experienced reading is an unconscious activity: how we think we read or imagine we read does not necessarily correspond to the cognitive process that is taking place in the transmission of text through our eyes and into our brains. There is nothing that we consciously experience in the act of reading that tells us how our brain processes text.
  • Bahman Eslami
    Bahman Eslami Posts: 73
    On another point I forgot to mention Arabic is abjad and thus efficient in taking space because it was created this way probably to save space on writing materials and has been evolved without loosing this features. One might argue that the words are more compressed when they are written. This is a form of compression that might take more cognitive activity to write but due to our familiarity with word shapes we don't decode them while reading thus leaving less letters to recognize as parts of words. This might also one of the reasons that I found Persian easier to scan if I want to just skim the text. I might be also biased about my arguments here as John mentioned but I still find this feature interesting to mention.
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,191
    It's notable that not all implementations of the Arabic script are abjads: some are alphabets (e.g. the Kurdish writing system). I suspect that the efficiency of abjads is related to the particular linguistic structures of certain languages that favour recognition of consonant patterns in identifying roots.
  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,126
    Just as Semitic languages are suited to consonantal alphabets (apparently the term "abjad" is a fairly recent coinage, and one that has some controversy attached to it), there are characteristics of Chinese that would complicate the move from characters to an alphabet that is frequently advocated as being likely to facilitate mass literacy.

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