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.
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?).