Don't you mean you love it? Loathe means you hate it.

I think it looks best with all the vowels and other diacritics, but I'm not a fan of the ligatures. They're more for handwriting to me.

I didn't know that! Yes, I love it.


Exactly, I prefer its handwriting to its printed version just for that. Or fonts that imitate handwriting well for that matter.

Seriously, I find it really sexy that Taa' + Miim become something very different. Or Faa' + Yaa' and so on.

                                 

And yes, I'm crazy, I know.

Well, that's the normal way of spelling في. I don't use the ligatures much myself, aside from لا which is obligatory, but I recognize them when others write them.

Personally I think it's enough of a pain to learn how each letter connects with the others, but to each his own.

How's your Arabic coming along?

But many fonts don't support that!—being لا the only compulsory one...

Yeah, to each his own. I mainly started liking them when I saw a friend's friend writing his name (Saala7) with a laam + 7aa' ligature—but me being unable to recognize it.

Yes, I love all ligatures but meem + 7aa'/jiim/khaa'. Those look ugly.


I've pretty much put it on hold for now. Two weeks ago I looked at some Mandarin books with which I started learning it and everything made a lot of sense to me! (One of those "Eureka moments" iwsfutcmd used to talk about.) I'll return later, don't worry about it.

Odd looking "Modern" Vietnamese calligraphy using the Latin script.


Some Hanoian dude doing Chinese calligraphy.

No, I mean that's the usual way of spelling the word في. It's normal letter-joining, not a ligature, strictly speaking.
Ligatures with those letters are among the most common. Most have fallen out of use. There used to be hundreds, some involving three or more letters, like those of Devanagari. You can see why people stopped using them.
Hey, I've had that moment recently. I imagine it takes a lot longer for Mandarin than most languages though.

Sometimes a good long break is just what you need.

I prefer Javanese, Balinese, Georgian, Tibetan and Syriac (Nestorian)
While I think the Cherokee writing system is fantastic, it's too blocky to be beautiful.

Speaking of ligatures, anyone ever heard or saw Cyrillic ones? They are heavily used in Church Slavonic texts. Here is an example of ligatures used in a 14th century manuscript of the New Testament from the monastery of Hilandar. There are also variants of some letters which span from the 12th to the 15th century.

Lower-case letters with variants


Lower-case ligatures


Upper-case letters with variants


Upper-case ligatures

The second one from the left looks familiar!

You're right! I didn't notice it. Weird... anyway, in Cyrillic it is a ligature for /sa/.