Submitted by Andy Olson, Jul 10, 2007 18:54

As a linguistic and a student of Arabic for several years now, I'm fairly horrified by Mr. McWhorter's suggestion that the Roman alphabet be used for transliteration for young students. Not only does a fair bit of Arabic phonology not line up well with our system of writing, but postponing the learning process does not make it easier in the long run--in fact, I would suspect that the final result is MORE confusion. The truth is that there is such a thing as baptism by fire, and to this day, I'm extremely grateful to my first Arabic tutor for overloading me with orthography from the get-go.

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