Maaluma: effective in inducing affect

Abstract

Preoccupied with the Arabic language’s complexity, and striving to find one common pointer of educational strength, this thesis, epistemological in its core, deals, manifestly with typographic issues. Nevertheless, it engages in the cultural, psychological, and neurological in order to serve the educational. It builds upon substantiated historical study of the genetic descent of the letters in general and the Arabic alphabet arbitrariness in particular with their respective cross-cultural interpretations along with related criticisms. From the naïve Cuneiform system of writing to the most elaborate mature Phoenician alphabet and onto the Latin before the Aramaic of which the Arabic is believed to have evolved, time tables and charts alike are set up as a leading reference manual, to mark the advent of typography with the printing press of Guttenberg in the 15th century. The rich exhibit of the various Arabic calligraphic styles is to mark the opposition of Islam towards typography, poising their sacred script above the machine made-type form, I am striving to reconcile throughout this investigation, I called Maaluma. It engages for this purpose in an overall study of phonemes of all civilizations ranging from Hieroglyph to the Proto-Siniatic the Hebrew and Latin before reaching out in particular for the Arabic phoneme as a unit base of that Arabic sacred script investigating its potentials according to Abbas’s domaining sensory analysis of the clusters of phonemes 1998. Changing towards operational and more functional outline status, carrying on bouba/kiki sound symbolism theory, the thesis proposes Maaluma a detached-attached Arabic letterforms concept, with its effect induction model and approved psychological methodology. A full spread on the bouba/kiki sound symbolism theory is devoted for that matter at the end of the thesis, offering to delve in the psychological infants, based on cognitive mapping, brain-sciences, and field experiments.