アラビア語版簡体字アラベティクスArabetics

アラビア語のアルファベットは右から左に書き,語頭,語中,語尾,独立形とかたちを変えるが,これを習得するのはアラビア語第二外国語として習う学習者には難しい。そこで,イラクアメリカ人のSaad D. Abulhabがアラビア語簡体字と呼べそうなものを発案し特許を取得した。Arabeticsは両方向から書くことが出来るうえ,文字をつなげずに離して書く。Arabeticsに基づいたフォントにはムタマティルMutamathilがある。

The whole thing came about because my 6-year-old daughter did not want to learn to read Arabic because she said it was written backwards," said Mr. Abulhab, an Iraqi-American who was born in California and spent his childhood in Baghdad. He earned a master's degree in library science and is now director of technology at the Newman Library of Baruch College in New York. He lives with his family in Milford, Conn.
That gave me the idea to make it bidirectional, with letters that went both ways but didn't lose their characteristics," he said. "It's your choice how to use them. Like with Chinese, which was originally written top to bottom but now is written mainly left to right by many young Chinese.
For someone like me, who learned right to left, I would prefer to read it right to left, he said. But my daughter could choose from left to right. Since the letters look exactly the same, you can choose how to arrange them. Like simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese; those two coexist.

http://arabetics.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/15/technology/15patent.html