Script is to language what spirit is to body. Without its own, innate script, a language is merely a dead body, a spiritless mass of assembled limbs. Is that what we want Urdu to become by discarding the Arabic script and taking on the Roman one?
Information technology has taken the world by storm. So has the English language. English has truly become the principal lingua franca of the so-called global village. Everyone has to use the English language, will-nilly. Especially in the communication between cultures or regions separated by language, the use of English is inevitable. Knowing English is the key to the treasurers of knowledge. Most of the latest research, on any subject, is available in English. Not knowing English in today’s world is like being deaf, dumb and blind — all at the same time. No one can deny the importance of English.
But, looking at the conquest of the world by the English language, a few questions pop up in the minds of those who really mind their own language and culture. Has any nation abandoned its own language or script like used clothes in favour of the English language or Roman script? Have the speakers of any language chosen to commit a cultural suicide by forsaking their script just to facilitate the use of computer (or Internet, to be precise)?
These questions spring up in my mind every time I read or listen to an argument in favour of Roman alphabets for Urdu. People advocating the change of Urdu’s script believe that we should marry off Urdu with Roman script and they — both Urdu and its new script — and we, too, shall live happily ever after. In this age of technology, so the argument goes, no language can survive without embracing the newfangled religion of science and technology, blah, blah, blah. These self-appointed friends of Urdu (wolf in sheep’s clothing, in fact) love to make you believe that let Urdu adapt the Roman alphabets and, lo and behold! Urdu will enter a world of modernity and information technology and an era of global currency and what not.
One feels that some unscrupulous quarters are running a regular and sponsored campaign to so brainwash the nation as to blind it to announce Urdu’s divorce from its life-long partner — rather, its soul and its life — the Arabic script. One is surprised at the sudden rebirth of this odd notion that one first heard of in the fifties and sixties, and that has long been dead and forgotten. One is quite justified for being suspicious about the motives of the campaign.
In modern times, except for Turkey, no nation has ever been so unreasonable as to snap its ties with its history, culture and literature by divorcing the script that helped them write and speak their mind to their fellow men for ages. Turkish nation might have had its own reasons — right or wrong — but it had nothing to do with the use of technology.
Mustafa Kamal Ata Turk changed the script of Turkish language from Arabic to Roman, in 1928, just because he hated Arabs and was fooled to believe that by forgetting its script and thus history, culture and religion, Turkey will at once enter an era of prosperity and fraternity with Europe.
But, alas! Equality and fraternity with Europeans elude Turkey even today — though about three quarters of a century have elapsed since the change of script — as Turkey is being denied entry to European Union, no matter how hard it tries to be more European than Europe. Therefore, making yourself more presentable or acceptable to others by discarding your identity is as stupid a thing to do as changing your skin and then trying to sell yourself as a new person.
And as far as the use of technology is concerned, few nations can match the Japanese. Japanese have surpassed almost every nation in use, as well as the invention of technology. Have they changed their script? Are they considering discarding their script in favour of Roman alphabets? Mario Pei, a well-known linguist, writes in his famous work The story of language, that though some American educators suggested to Japanese, about half a century ago, that they ‘get rid of’ their own script and use Roman alphabets instead. The Japanese refused. They gave the argument that it would necessitate to scrap all their existing books and reprint them in the new script. And mind you, Japanese script is not among the easiest of them all as it consists of Chinese ideographs and syllabic characters.
What about other ‘technology-rich’ nations like Russia, China and Korea and the developed countries like Malaysia? Are they planning any such switch-over? No, it is only the Pakistani nation that has the guts and genius it takes to have a brilliant idea like drowning one’s history, culture, literature, religious thought and all intellectual assets by adapting an unsuitable script.
WHY URDU’S SCRIPT SHOULD NOT BE REPLACED:
Script is to language what spirit is to body. Without its own, innate script, a language is merely a dead body — a spiritless mass of assembled limbs. A script usually takes centuries — even more — to develop, taking care of all the linguistic intricacies, phonetic needs and calligraphic necessities. A natural, innate and self-grown script is the only way through which any language can fully expose its beauty, pronounce all its sounds, express its delicacies and demonstrate its real potential. In any alien script, a language becomes a soulless slave, a captive bird whose wings have been clipped and whose spirits have been crushed.
In its essence, Urdu’s script is a modified form of Semitic script that was used in writing Arabic. But it reached the Indo-Pak subcontinent via Iran. Arabic script does not have the alphabets to represent certain sounds that are an integral part of the Persian language. Iranians simply made some additions and modifications to the Arabic characters to fully represent in writing the sounds of the Persian language that had a richer phonology than Arabic.
When Muslim invaders and conquerors brought this script to the subcontinent, similar innovations helped write and show the pronunciation of the Sanskrit sounds and alphabets that Urdu has but were missing in the Arabic script. Like the script of many other languages, Urdu’s script is the only tool that can produce and display all the sounds this language has. The script of any language is historically and pragmatically developed, in a natural way over the centuries, to incorporate all the sounds and slightest change in the pronunciation and emphasis.
Adapting a new scrip is not easy for any language and this task becomes even more difficult when the borrowed script does not contain sounds that occur in the speech of that particular language. The same difficulty was faced by some African languages, which had never been written in any form, whether alphabetic or pictorial, and were trying to adapt the Roman script. Urdu contains many sounds that do not occur in the languages using Roman script.
And as far as the sounds are concerned, Urdu can be proud of having the richest variety of alphabets that can pronounce and produce almost any sound. Be it qaaf, ain, ghain and suaad of Arabic, or zhay of Persian or rday and ghay of Sanskrit, or any other sound for that matter, Urdu can say it and write it the way it is pronounced, in its own script perfectly. In other words, Urdu’s own script is far more superior to the Roman script that can hardly demonstrate only half of Urdu’s sounds. Yet another problem posed by Urdu’s Roman script is: many words must have an extra vowel as Urdu’s present script (Arabic) has fewer vowels and it shows the vowel values above or below the line with the help of dashes and other diacritical marks. As a result, some vowels would become diphthongs. In other words, Roman script would change the very character of the language.
Now a few words about the script English uses. It is a well-known fact that when English adapted Latin letters, it was felt from the very beginning that these letters are not only insufficient for writing English but some of them are redundant, too. The Roman script was invented for the linguistic need of Romans and later on adapted by other nations. As a result, the spelling in the English language is so much different from the pronunciation that many linguists have very rightly described it as ‘arbitrary’.
G.B. Shaw even went so far, while ridiculing the spelling rules, as to say that in English the word ‘fish’ can be spelled as ‘ghoti.’ His contention was that according to these funny spelling rules ‘gh’ sometimes denotes ‘f’, as in ‘laugh,’ and ‘o’ is sometimes pronounced as ‘i’, as in ‘women,’ and ‘ti’ is equivalent to ‘sh,’ as in ‘nation.’ So ‘ghoti’ can be read as ‘fish.’ He even announced a large sum of money as prize for anyone who would rationalize the English spelling rules.
But orthographic reform (as changing the spelling is known) is no joke. It is almost next to impossible for a language like English, that has got only 26 alphabets to represent about 44 phonemes, on a symbol-for-sound basis. English is not only unable to pronounce many sounds but it also cannot denote many single sounds by a single letter, ‘sh’ or ‘ch’, for instance, which can be indicated by just one letter in Urdu and many other languages. Enlisting the flaws of the Roman alphabets is not presently my aim, I, therefore, refrain from dwelling on it.
Those who advocate Roman alphabets for Urdu perhaps do not fully understand the significance of script. Perhaps, they can think of a language and its script separately. While in essence, script is the language itself. Alphabets, in fact, are symbols that represent elementary sounds used in any language. Only an innate, indigenous script can denote all the subtleties, slight changes in the stress and delicate variations of sounds a language has. To check this claim, just try to write English in Urdu script, i.e. Arabic, and the result will be far from being satisfactory, though Urdu script’s ability to indicate very slight changes and to indicate all the sounds will be very helpful.
Another aspect of adapting Roman script for Urdu is that it will at once snap off our cultural ties with the Middle East. A common script binds Pakistan with Iran and the Arab countries. Due to this script, it becomes very easy to learn Arabic and Persian for a person who already knows Urdu. While travelling in Iran or in any Arab country, it is so much easier to read signs, boards and simple instructions at airports, roads or elsewhere. Likewise, the citizens of these countries do not find these things to be so much alien in Pakistan if it is written in Urdu.
And what about our posterity? They will be unable to understand the treasures of our literature, be it Urdu or Arabic or Persian. Each and every masterpiece will have to be transliterated into Roman before they can enjoy this wealth. The woes do not end here. The greatest of loss that a Muslim can imagine is the cruelty of being deprived of the blessing of reciting Quran. What a loss!
COMPUTER AND URDU: As for the use of computer and Internet, a large number of Urdu softwares are available in the market and are being used by all and sundry. Urdu email is not something unheard of now. Among many others, Muqtadra Qaumi Zaban (National Language Authority) (www.nla.gov.pk) has been working very hard for ‘cyber Urdu.’ And, thank God, they have been very successful. An Urdu website www.pehchan.com, contains about 250,000 pages and all what is of interest. It also provides the Urduphiles with Urdu email and Urdu chatting facilities. The XP version of Microsoft’s windows provides the users with facility of adding other languages, including Urdu, to their computer and to change the description (of on-screen icons) and other instructions into Urdu. The use of Urdu Mahir (by PMDC, Karachi) makes the Urdu publishing easier.
So, advocating the need for change of Urdu’s script on this pretext should be stopped now. Those who advocate any such change are not Urdu’s friends and if at all, with friends like that, who needs foes?
Script is to language what spirit is to body. Without its own, innate script, a language is merely a dead body, a spiritless mass of assembled limbs. Is that what we want Urdu to become by discarding the Arabic script and taking on the Roman one? 
