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Jan van Steenbergen wrote: > The common > feeling when we finally discovered the world of conlangers could best be > described as "Wow!". I'm getting super busy reading their posts :-) > In my view, a language is merely a > means of communication. You can use it for communicating religious content as > well as non-religious. That is my view, too. > I wouldn't say that any text written in Biblical Hebrew > is carrying any religious burden; you can also translate "Das Kapital" or > Stephen King's "It" into it, without making it any more or less religious. Glad to hear. Arabic translation of those novels wouldn't be problems, either. However, that is not my point in writing Arabic dialect. As you know, Arabic word formation has basically 2 features -- Arabic alphabets as phonogram, and Arabic word forms as ideogram. (the jargon might not suit here, though) In MSA and Classical Arabic, there isn't a huge discrepancy between what is written and what is actually spoken. However, the voweling rules in Spoken Arabic (of Cairo, in particular) is very different from MSA: it prioritize rhythms & accent rules over voweling rules based on grammar and word formation of MSA, to my eye. So, as long as Arabic alphabets are used in dialect writing, the 2 features of Arabic word formation make the issue very complicated. Let's take 'waasi3a'(adj.f.,wide) for example. In Cairine dialect the word is pronounced 'was3a'. In MSA, [CaaCiCa] is a form of adj.f. and [CvCCa] is a form of verbal noun. If you write down 'was3a' as it is pronounced with Arabic alphabets, what you write will have the same word form of 'wus3a'(vn.f.,wideness) in MSA, and this would make you confuse in understanding the meaning. In other words, in dialect writing, the ideographic feature of Arabic script collapses. This would lead a great confusion if people start to write down anything, including words used in Quran, as it is pronounced in their dialects. It would lead misinterpretation of the Quranic texts. For that Arabic is used in Quran and Muslims are the majority of Arabic speaking population, writing their dialect with Aranbic/Quranic script is to avoid, in Arabic native speakers' opinion. Kay -- ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: :::