The Farce that is HINDI

[Gunthard Mueller]

Oh, by the way-- German was written in two alphabets until the 20th century,
too.
In the beginning of the century, my own grandfather, Franz Betz, a classical
scholar and politician, used to work openly against the Nazis as long as it
was possible (roughly until the emergency laws came into effect, 1933). On
the cultural side, he tried to
help make Germany less inward-bound and less nationalist by letting it adopt
the Latin alphabet used by most of the rest of the western world, as
replacement for the obscure Frakturschrift favoured by the traditionalists
and of course the nationalists.
Getting Germany out of the obscure Frakturschrift was only one of his minor
concerns... Although of course at that time it was an issue loaded with
symbolism.

One of the lessons I find in all this: don't use alphabets/scripts to make a
country more provincial. Use them to bring us all closer to each other. Teach
them, simplify them, compute them...

Yours,
Gunthard

gm at e-ternals.com




Raveen Satkurunathan wrote:

> On Fri, 2 Feb 2001 11:24:49 +0530, Samar Abbas <abbas at IOPB.RES.IN> wrote:
>
> >artificial Hindu-Muslim unity. However, he could never explain as to how
> >his new `secular' creation was the only language in the world which
> >somehow possessed two scripts.
>
> South Slavic Serbo-Croatian is also written in two scripts, Cyrillic for
> Serbian and Roman for Croatian.
>
> Raveen