Sunday, 1 March 2020

on Flügel, Vollers ­‒ Marijn van Putten again

Please skip this post.
It is not on print editions of the qurʾān.
Just on a twitter thread by a Leiden scholar, a brilli­ant linguist.

If you think: "typo, don't be so strict!"
van der Put published it a week ago, published it a second time un­changed in "Thread reader" and there are two years 1934 and 1950. In my view there are both wrong.

Anyhow, I am too young: For me Flügel's sorry effort was only laughing­stock. I am asto­nished that Marijn van Putten devotes time to it. On Twitter he calls "Flügel's well-inten­tioned mess ... Schlimm­besse­rung ... 'cor­recting' [the Arab texts that he finds in the mss.] in his print edition.
From what he writes it is obvious, that he is not aware that Bobzin wrote that the verse num­bers are not his, but those of Hinkel­mann.

And he ignores "Die Divergenzen zwischen dem Flügel- und dem Azhar-Koran" by Arne A. Ambros in Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes Vol. 78 (1988), pp. 9-21

His ignorance is helpful. Other­wise, he would not have devoted a fresh ‒ an unnecessary ‒ look at the book.

What is even stranger:
He dismisses Karl Vollers' Volkssprache und Schriftsprache im alten Arabien (1906)
although Vollers comes to conclusions that resemble his in "The Language of the Uthmanic Codex"

I thought he is a bright linguist, who stupidly writes about things he does not under­stand. After this thread I know better.

Postscriptum
After he was alerted to the mistake, he tweeted "lol" ‒ by now deleted.
I do not believe that it was a typo, I am convinced that van der Put believed in what he wrote. Why?
Because almost everything he writes about printed copies is wrong.
In his thread on niʿmat allāh ‒ unlike the con­ference held in Berlin and the twitter thread, in his by now pub­lished article he is correct: "niʿmat allāh/rabbi-ka", some of his Grace of God-places are in fact Grace of your Lord-places -- he compares early manu­scripts which the Cairo Edition al­though here ALL standards (Maghrib, Gizeh24, Turkey, India, Indo­nesia) agree completely.
In his iǧtabā-hu-thread
he speaks of "modern print editions" al­though HERE there are two different standard groups: Africa vs. Asia. ‒ Each time he gets it wrong.
Like most Arabist/linguists he has not studied modern editions: he writes about a field he largely ignores. So, I take it that he did not know a thing about the Flügel edition.

But because his article is very important, I annotate it where it talks on modern editions.
van Putten writes "Sadeghi[(& Bergmann 2010] defines the Uthmanic text type as agree­ing with the text of the 1924 Cairo Edition of the Quran" (p.272) without giving a quote or the page. ‒ I can' find it.
Several times he mentions "the Sanaa palimpsest" when he means to say "the lower text of ..."
More serious:
"the Uthmanic text type have been accurate­ly trans­mitted up until the Cairo edition." (p. 280)
There has been no accurate trans­mission from century to century, from muṣḥaf to muṣḥaf, but the Cairo edition of 1924 claims to be a recon­struction on the basis of the literature on the rasm, the ḍabṭ ...
When you have a manuscript from the 8th century and a print from the 20th, you know nothing about trans­mission; for that you have to study mss. from the centuries between.

A last point, although I know that many find it niggling, but I love correct language.
is written plene" (three times) ‒ words can be written plene, sounds are written.

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