Monday, 11 March 2019

India 1800 Long vowels

Gabriel Said Reynolds and others say that all Qur'anic texts are identical: letter for letter.
the various editions of the Qur'an printed today (with only extra-ordinary ex­cep­tions) are identi­cal, word for word, letter for letter.
"Introduction to The Qur'an in its Historical Context, Abingdon: Routledge 2008, p.1.
Nonsense! There are probably a thousand different ways of writing or typesetting Qurans.
That does not mean that the prints say different things. They don't. They are similar enough -> mean the same. The differences that the exact same text allows in inter­pretation are certainly 100 times more signi­ficant than all the differences between different prints. Many dif­ferences are purely orthographic (such as folx­heršaft and Volks­herrschaft, night and nite, le roi and le rwa), others change the sense of a word, even a sentence, but do not really change the passage.
I am not at all concerned with contra­dictions in the Qur'an, with differences in content between one and another, I am only concerned with dif­ferences in ortho­graphy (that is, the spelling rules and particular cases).
Nor am I concerned with the differences between the seven/ten ca­noni­cal readers, the four­teen/ twenty trans­mitters, the hun­dreds of tra­dents. These primarily con­cern the phone­tic struct­ure (sometimes a "min" or "wa", an alif or a con­sonant doubling more or less); the variants only say whether a vowel is lengthen­ed five­fold or threefold, whether the basmala is repeated between two suras or a takbir is spoken before a particular one. I am not concerned with all this.
I am interested in the differences between Otto­man and Moroc­can, Persian and Indian maṣāḥif ‒ and how the official Egyptian Qurʾān of 1924 differs from those before it. Because there is a lot of nonsense circu­lating about this.
Qurans differ in a hundred ways. I will not present this systema­tically. For example, reading (qi­ra­ʾa), ductus, lines per page, whether verses may be spread over two pages, whether 30th must begin on a new page, whether rukuʿat are dis­played in the text and on the mar­gin, whether each verse is followed by a num­ber, whether alter­native count­ing systems are in­dicated, and whether pages have cus­to­di­ans/catch words on the bottom of each (second) page, whether there are one, three, four, five, six ... or six­teen pause signs. All this can occur, but will not be syste­ma­ti­cally dis­cussed.
I focus attention on two points:
the spelling of words, the Quranic vocabulary, so to speak ‒ al­though (un­like Le Dictionaire de l'Academie, Meriam-Webster, Duden) the same word is not to be written the same way in all places;
the rules of how vowel length, shorten­ing and diph­tongs are notated, like assimi­lation of con­sonants, and how hamza at the start of words is written. I am par­ticular­ly inter­ested in prints.

There are two main spellings/set of rules: African (Maghrebi, Anda­lusian, Arabic) and Asian (Indo-Pakistani, Indo­nesi­an, Persian, Ottoman): Africans always need two signs for long vowels: a vowel sign and a match­ing elong­ating vowel letter; if the latter is not in the rasm, it is added in small (or a non-match­ing one is made suit­able by a Changing-Alif).
this two signs modell cor­responds to the view of the gram­ma­ti­ci­ans that there a haraka, lengthened by a ḥarf al-madd, while (follow­ing) Asian mo­dell may reflect the Sankrit model of matras
Asians have three short vowel signs and three long vowel signs (plus Sukūn/Ǧazm). But ac­cord­ing to today's IPak rules, for ū and ī, one uses the short vowel signs IF the match­ing vowel letter follows (which gets a ǧazm). With long ā, Per­sians and Otto­mans/Turks always used the long vowel sign; Indi­ans today use it only if no alif follows (i.e. wau, [dot­less] yāʾ or no vowel at all); if an alif follows, the con­sonant before it only gets a Fatḥa. In the case of long-ī, Persians and Otto­mans always used the Lang-ī sign (regard­less of whether it is followed by yāʾ or not); In­dians to­day pro­ceed simil­arly to ā: if it is not fol­lo­wed by a yāʾ, the long-ī sign is used: be­fore yāʾ, how­ever, there is (only) Kasra and the yāʾ gets a ǧazm. (Ac­cord­ing to IPak, sign-less letters are silent!).
For long ū, Ottomans put "madd" under a wau; for the elon­gated per­sonal pro­noun -hū the elon­ga­tion remains un­notat­ed. Indians and Indo­nesians use the long ū sign but the short u sign before waw, while before 1800, Indians al­ways used the long-ū-sign, follow­ing wau re­mained with­out any sign was thus silent (to be ignored when read­ing) ‒ if it is second part of the diph­tong au, it got and gets a Ǧazm, thus is to be spoken. Always the long ī sign. Always the long-ā-sign. In other words:
In 1800, there were two systems of noting long vowels: the Magh­re­b­ian, which always included two parts, a vowel sign (fatḥa, kasra, ḍamma, imāla-point) and a leng­then­ing vowel (belonging to the rasm or a small com­ple­ment). And an Indian system based en­tire­ly on long vowel signs, in which the vowel letters pre­sent in the rasm were com­pletely ig­nored. The Magh­rebi system is used to­day in Africa and Arabia. The Indian system is used in weakened forms in Turkey, Persia, India and Indo­ne­sia. In India and Indone­sia, IPak applies, where long ā con­tinues to be used before (dotless) yāʾ, but before alif it has been re­placed by fatḥa (like in the African system) Before ī-yāʾ / ū-waw stand kasra / ḍamma; above the vowel let­ter stands ǧazm ‒ other­wise they had no influence on pro­noun­cia­tion. The old Indian system only applies where no vowel letter follows. How widespread this clear Indian system was, I do not know. I came across several manu­scripts using it, but no print.

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Warš

The best post so far is here , just about Morcco here .