Fascinating article. It really impresses upon one the differences and commonalities between the different scripts. I never realized how much art there was involved in these other languages.<p>I'm bilingual, perfectly fluent in both English and Arabic. From my studies/experiences, I find that English alone from all others that I've come across is a purely functional language. It serves no other purpose than to <i>get the message across</i> and do so effectively. Most other languages are a form of sacred art, with a million rules deciding how the script itself is formed, what's acceptable and what's not, and tend to hang on to certain words, typefaces, accents, and dialects in written form even when the spoken language so greatly diverges from the traditional written script.<p>A primary example here is Arabic: the spoken and written languages differ quite drastically, with the spoken dialect turning into an almost different language as you move across from the Levant areas (Syria/Jordan/Palestine/Lebanon) over into Iraq and then the Gulf countries (Saudi, Kuwait, etc.) and finally into Africa at which point it doesn't even come close to resembling its spoken counterpart that we started off with.<p>Yet, with all that, the written language is 100% identical. Even though there are new <i>words</i> from region to region (not just a matter of intonation/inflection/dialect), the written language is perfectly identical and can be shared understood without difficult. In reality, these people know two different languages entirely. This is, by and large, caused by the memorization of the Quran, which is the holy scripture for Muslims which comprise the majority of the Arab world. The Quran is set in the official "formal Arabic" and Islam doesn't allow for the rewording or modernization of the script since Muslims believe that the actual wording (rather than the meaning) of the Quran was sent down from Allah and is sacred and not be modified (though translations of the Quran exist in almost all languages for reference/reading purposes, the religious actions such as prayers, etc. must be done with the formal arabic script, even in non-arabic-speaking parts of the world such as India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and even the States).<p>Back to the point at hand: In French, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, and more there is so much attributed to the beauty of the script, the perfection of the symbols, the fluency of the spoken language, and the scientific rules holding the language together. Languages aren't <i>really</i> living in the same sense as they are in English: new words aren't <i>officially</i> added as often, and the languages themselves serve a much more interesting and less "mundane" task than simply getting ideas across. These languages exist in and of themselves, in a way, they're not only there to serve the speaker: the speaker actually serves the language in many ways.