Unified Arabic
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Unified Arabic is an Arabic orthographic reform proposal created by Nasri Khattar aimed at boosting literacy in the Arabic world.[1] Its goal is to reduce the amount of letterforms that needed to be learned to write Arabic by negating the need for initial, medial, final, isolated, and ligature forms by removing the calligraphic cursive nature of the Arabic script. It consists of a set of 30 letters, one for each letter of the Arabic alphabet with the addition of hamza and lam alef. Unified Arabic had support from large backers such as the Ford Foundation and IBM, but it ultimately failed due to the cultural circumstances of the Arabic script.
Unlike Romanisation, Unified Arabic did not seek to replace the existing Arabic alphabet with something new. But rather, its intended purpose was to pare down the amount of letterforms in Arabic to make it a more easily printed, typed, and read, language.
History[edit]
Being an orthography based upon calligraphy, the Arabic script's letters take on initial, medial, final, isolated, and varying amounts of ligature forms. This makes the Arabic script difficult to learn, to print, and to render by typing.
Nasri Khattar created Unified Arabic after, in 1932, he mistyped the letterform for the Arabic letter heh (ه) and realised that the word he had written was still readable. Khattar began a long process of reductive design until he was left with 30 forms that represented every letter in the Arabic alphabet along with an additional two, hamza (ء) and lam alef (ﻻ). Khattar's goal was to reduce the number of letter forms one had to learn to be able to read, print, and type Arabic. He believed this would increase literacy in the Arabic-speaking world.
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- ↑ "Fighting Illiteracy With Typography by Yara Khoury Nammour (Works That Work magazine)". worksthatwork.com. Retrieved 2021-06-20.
