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 style, writing style, 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 verses have numbers 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 in the 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. I am particular­ly inter­ested in prints.
There are two main spellings/set of rules: African (Maghrebi, Anadlusian, 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).
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 wau, 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; abobve 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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Delhi 1895 Tafsīr-i Ḥusaini

Tafsīr-i Ḥusainī by Ḥusain Waʿiẓ Kāšifī