ARABIC AND THE ORIENT.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 112, 14 May 1929, Page 6

ARABIC AND THE ORIENT.

Arabic Las hitherto formed a barrier to the Westernisation of the Orient. It is due to its passive resistance that Western modes and habits of life have not been systematically adopted in that huge region stretching between the Nile and the Euphrates. Now that Amanullah's moral defeat has set more or less of a limit to the penetration of Western civilisation into Asia, the latter seems to be slowly preparing for a counteroffensive and for an energetic defence of its cultural supremacy over the peoples of the countries between the Atlantic and the Indus. It is supported in this, as ever, by European archaeologists and explorers of the East. . .A practical beginning was made in this direction, by King Fuad 1., who, with a view to strengthening the position of the Arabic alphabet against the incursion of the Latin script, has offered a prize, to be won in a competition, for the submission qf vowel signs and characters for capital letters for the Arabic alphabet. Arabic is now written without vowels, its. chief drawback as compared with Latin, and without the use of capitals. t Sir Denison Ross, the eminent British Orientalist, delivered a lecture in Cairo recently, in which he expressed his views on the Latin and Arabic alphabets. According to him, the Latin is a distorted alphabet not at all suitable for European languages, characters for many of the sounds of those languages being wanting. Thus, for the English language, recourse has had to be taken to combining two letters to make one sound, "th" and "ch" for instance, while for German as many as four letters have had to be joined to form the single sound of "tsch." The Russians were more practical and invented new signs for such sounds in their language for which the Latin contained no equivalent. At all events, for Turkish, Latin characters were more suitable than Arabic, the latter possessing no vowel signs, while in Turkish much depended on the manifold changes to which the vowels were subject. Nevertheless, Mustapha Kemal, whom Sir Denison Ross regards as a man of great intellectual qualities, has made mistakes in adapting the Latin script to the Turkish language. Thus, for instance, in the use of the "i," minus the dot, to stand for an old Turkish character, and with the dot to stand for another. The simplicity between the two symbols is confusing.