From: e.d.wardini@easteur-orient.uio.no (Elie Dib Wardini) (Elie Dib Wardini)
Subject: An opinion on AlphaLeb
Organization: UiO
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1992 16:11:46 GMT

 posted for Barre Ludvigsen:


Elie,

You asked me what I though of AlphaLeb. 

Let me first make a couple of personal remarks. I do
consider Lebanese my second mother language, after English
but before Norwegian. The reason is that I grew up in
Lebanon. They were the most formative and happy years of my
life. English was used at school, making it the only
language in which I have formal training. Norwegian was used
at home but I never learnt it formally even though I do now
use it as my main language daily. Lebanese however is the
language of my heart. It is the language that I used among
friends, the language in which I heard the stories of my
childhood, which gave me my first knowledge of real life
politics and religion. It is the language that taught me the
color of the world by moonlight and the language that gave
me music and songs. That must be a true mother language, no.

lug^at l-alb, l-ruH wl-Hluum! 

My opinions on this subject, although heartfelt and
earnest, are probably not worth much in that I have not
really been able to practice my Lebanese on a regular basis
for many years. Even worse, I never learnt how to read or
write until I took it up little over a year ago. My
mother's heroic efforts in getting me to take lessons while
we still lived in Saida, never came to much. Thanks
entirely to my own youthful negligence. The result is that
in spite of pronuciation that has even Lebanese impressed a
rather restricted vocabulary hampers my means both of
expression and understanding. (I pride myself on being
recognized as Lebanese by other Arabs, and even more at
enjoying Lebanese taxi rates in Boston!)

Even so, I will express an opinion for what it's worth. For
two reasons. 

The first is one of feeling: I simply do feel quite
strongly on the matter. I also will insist that I have both
the right and duty to egange myself in culturally important
matters that concern the country that made me what I am. It
is too dear to me to be ignored even if my hope of
returning to return its gifts appears to be deminishing by
the year.

The second is one of reason: I have often experienced
(especially during recent years) that I have been accepted
as a Lebanese expatriate on the merits of my language and in
spite of my unmistakaby non-arab appearance. I have
understood this to be evidence of the growing expatriate
Lebanese community and sadly, their increasing distance from
the language. I suspect that this might in fact be one of
the main reasons for proposing AlphaLeb in the first place.

1. The positives

The proposal has its strong and unchallengable merits in the
expression, preservation and developement of a true Lebanese
cultural identity and cultural tradition. 

The proposal has a particularly strong merit in its
potential for making Lebanese more readily accessible to a
growing expatriate community. Growing both in numbers, buth
not least in maturity and cultural awareness.

It also has some very strong merits in the situation of
increasing contraditions of identity and allegiance that
now must arise after the new found "peace" in Lebanon
itself. Expatriate Lebanese who are "coming of age" find
themselves in an increasingly intolerable position which
they somehow must resolve personally. To return to a
country bereft of its earlier cultural strengths and ever
more difficult to rebuild as uniquely Lebanese? To remain
expatriate and by default forgoe that right to partake in
the effort of rebuilding at home? Even to leave Lebanon now
(to what more often than not, will be a permanent stage of
refuge, in spite of pledges to the contrary) because of the
apparent futility of the political and social situation? Or
to resign oneself to the rather impoverished reality of
attempting to build and preserve a Lebanese diaspora similar
to the Armenian, Anatolian Greek, and many other national
communities in exile? 

There are of course the arguments that many of those
expatriate communites are especially over the recent years,
experiencing the success of their efforts at cultural
preservation and perserverance, in as much as political
developements have allowed them to return home. It must
however, be reason for reflection to consider the very
strong risk in such policies, as the instances of success
are by no means high. On the other hand, there is no choice
either. The expatriate community does exist. It has its own,
very legitimate needs for cultural identity. And those need
must also be adapted to the cultural environment in which
they live.

Within the framework of the latter argument, my own
expatriate countrymen can be used as a vivid example.
Granted, there is the very important difference that the
reason for their emigration was not as dramatic and
physically threatening as that of the Lebanese conflict.
They did, however, emigrate to the Americas, overwhelmingly
to the US Mid-West, in such numbers that they now outnumber
by far the population of this country. Suffice it to say,
that in spite of an increasing tolerance, even encouragement
of ethnic identity in most western countries during the last
20 years, the number of Norwegian language newspapers in the
"Norwegian" cities of the US has dwindled from a dozen
between the wars, to a single paper today. It's a situation
common to almost all immigrant foreign language communities.

>From that point of view, it might be interesting to
investigate the state of Lebanese useage in the larger
expatriate communities outside the US. It would be
interesting to know the state of cultural strength and
survival of Lebanese in South America and West Afica. It
would undoubtedly have some bearing on the prospects of
success for AlphaLeb.


2. The worries

Having expressed my feeling that AlphaLeb's greatest merit
is its potential for strengthening the cultural position of
Lebanese as a language, I cannot but confess that I have
some very strong worries about it's potential success. 

If it is truly meant to be an effort in the defence and
development of Lebanese, it is inseparable from Arabic both
as a language and as alphabet. 

If it is meant as an expedient for writing in Lebanese, and
particularly with digital aids, there are other, much better
and more culturally defensible methods of acheiving that
those means and aims.

My main worry and argument is that Lebanese, in whatever
linguistic form, is inseparable from the Arabic language,
alphabet and scripts. Divorce is a painful process, because
it negates the principle of love on which a relationship was
initially founded. The uniquely Lebanese form of culture and
life is inescapably rooted in the overwhelming strengths of
the Arabic language. (Much in the same way that the uniquely
Norwegian character and culture is rooted in the Catholic
traditions of Europe, even though the majority of Norwegians
neither feel nor are particularly aware or indeed endeared
by that fact.)  Divorcing the Lebanese language from the
Arabic by using the Latin alphabet as a basis for AlphaLeb,
which is what it would mean, is in my opinion a grave
mistake. As an expedient for digital communication it is
fine. I would indeed make a strenuous effort to use it
myself, in the absence of otherwidespread means of writing.
But an alphabet as a means of conveying language is an
extremely strong visual means of expression. It's visual
character is inexorably tied to lingustic and cultural
expression. It may just be my rather romantic view, painted
with the reminiscences of childhood, but Arabic is more than
any langauge tied to the visual and graphic forms of its
alphabet and many expressive scripts.

Thus, as an expedient for communication digitally within the
constrains of the latin alphabet ASCII code, AlphaLeb is an
admirable innovation, which I aplaud and welcome. As an
alphabet for Lebanese, it merely serves to widen the gap
between the Lebanese expatriate community on the net and
those off, whether at home or abroad. Arabic character
typewriters have been available for ages. Arabic editors and
processors for various digital environments are available
and will undoubtedly increase in number. With a growing
software development community both public and private,
there will surely be developed programs of a uniquely Middle
Eastern character with which to express the various Arabic
languages in Arabic scripts. 

I would therefore hope that the group responsible for
AlphaLeb, would immediatly go on to proposing 2 steps that
might bring AlphaLeb into the mainstream of Arabic langauge
culture:

1. A modified Arabic alphabet and character set making it
easier to express the pequliarly Lebanese colors of the
language.

2. Communications front ends that allow the exchange of
digital writing in the Arabic Lebanese character set.
Granted that many users of the net are restricted to
"ancient" VT100 and similar terminal technologies. I would
venture to presume, whoever, that the overwhelming majority
do have netwrok access to at leat one of the 3 main graphic
environments available (PC, Macintosh and X). It would be a
real technological and cultural advancement if this effort
could instigate the development of front ends to mail
programs and news readers on these 3 platforms that
facilitate the display of graphic chracter sets other than
the latin ASCII. With the widespread availability of Arabic
editors in 2 of the mentioned environments, it should not be
unreasonable to anticipate the developement of at least one
for the third (X11). Front ends for the automatic conversion
and display of graphic images already exist on several
platforms (NewsGrazer on NeXt is an excellent example). At
any rate, simple utilities exist on all three platforms for
the manual conversion and display of graphics. The effort
would therefore seem to be one of deciding on a standard
scheme of compression and conversion.

With the present climate of high interest in multimedia
communications (my own field along with information
architecture), it would seem that such tools for linguistic
communication might be the very means need to increase the
impact of the technology. It would also doubtless bring the
technology closer to that very large Middle Eastern
community where it is strikingly absent.


In my view, the most positive aspect of the above
modifications, would bring the AlphaLeb effort into the
unique position of influencing, providing standards and
motivations for the ways in which other Arabic languages
could be adapted to their own particularly national
cultural forms. Thus offsetting what must be one of the
underlying concerns behind the launching of the whole
effort. 

- Barre Ludvigsen

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Physical:                                                Virtual:
Barre Ludvigsen                                borrel@dhhalden.no
Associate Professor, Architect                borrel@ulrik.uio.no
Ostfold Regional College                73277.3443@Compuserve.com
Department of Computer Science          
Os Alle 9                                    *** NeXT Mail OK ***
N-1750 HALDEN, Norway
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