Interesting, reminds me of Sorani (Kurdish), with a script similar to Perso-Arabic , where only some, short vowels are represented using markers. This means that you end up with less connected characters which makes it visually stand out compared to say, Persian, Arabic or Urdu.

examples:

- Sorani: سوور sûr for red, که ر kar for donkey (note the double و and ه in the middle of the word), and

- Persian: سور sur (an old word for red, currently unused besides some festival names IIRC), خر khar (donkey)

This makes Kurdish actually much easier to read (non need to memorise the typical vowel patterns as in Arabic or Persian) since the writing is mostly aligned with pronunciation.

Weirdly enough, if we discard the current cultural context (English as the lingua franca) for a new speaker of an Indo-European language, learning Sorani from writing might be easier than picking up English (Ghoti and chips anyone?).

I have observed that being exposed to learning to read the English alphabet as the first Latin Alphabet leads to bad habits when learning to read other Latin-based scripts later on. Even if English is not the mother tongue of the speaker. Dunno if that is the case for French as well, as it also uses the Latin alphabet in a peculiar way.

Yeah, In my experience understanding the history of the language and phonetics helps a lot with those situations. And, obv. things get easier with exposure to more languages as new patterns start to emerge.

I'd always find it funny when be English friends would point our how difficult to read Polish is, where (with one small exception most native speakers wouldn't notice) the alphabet corresponds to the pronunciation.

The Arabic script has vowel letters, but they are used for long vowels only when writing the Arabic language. However, it is not strictly necessary to use the Arabic script that way. Several other languages use it like an alphabet and employ the vowel letters as such.

Ottoman authorities banned the production of Arabic/Turkish texts using the printing press in the 16th century. As a result, the first printed publication in the Ottoman Empire was in Hebrew!

This enormous act of self-sabotage probably kept the alphabets in the Muslim world from standardizing during the 1500s-1800s as the Europeans had, so variations in writing remained common. Pre-1400s texts from Europe look weird, too.

Lebanese were printing in 1610 in both Arabic and Syriac.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_media_in_Lebanon#Press

The link actually says its the first publication in the middle east.

One book was printed in 1610 — a book of psalms. The article goes on to say that one of the first printing presses in the region was founded in 1734. You can find a list of the presses here, note that there is a lot more being printed in Armenian and Hebrew than in Arabic or Turkish:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_spread_of_the_printing_p...

Even in Lebanon the presses were introduced by Maronites; the Islamic authorities were apparently not fans of the technology. You will also notice the presses in Safed from 1577; it's likely that your 1610 example is referring to the first book, specifically.

Just for comparison, the first newspaper in Mexico started in 1539 (Mexico City), and the first in India in 1556 (Goa). The first book in the Ottoman Empire was printed in Constantinople in 1493. The Ottomans, then the largest empire in the world (until the Spanish conquest of Mexico), absolutely could have adopted printing a century before your date if they had just... wanted to. The list gives 1706 for the first continuously operated Arabic press in the Ottoman Empire at Aleppo.

Yeah Maronites weren’t exactly keen on the ottoman empire and would even oppose them and wage rebellions at times throughout history.

I just felt the need to comment since I remember learning that factoid in my history class growing up and never had a chance to say it :)