Wednesday 10 April 2024
orthography (two for one)
In this blog I treat the quranic orthography ‒ not the extremely few different letters and the few differences in vowelling, doubling of letters due to the different qirāʾāt ‒ but only the different conventions of writing Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim.
The main points you find here
In several posts I make clear that the Arabic script has just letters, not consonants and vowels. Many assume that the earliest "Hiǧāzī" manuscripts had neither diacritical dots nor vowel marks ‒ both "invented" later. This is not the case. About 200 years later ‒ when the text was already well established ‒ Kufic manuscripts (on landscape parchments) were produced without dots, but the earliest (portrait) parchments had diacritical strokes where necessary. But because vowelling was not yet established sometimes alif, yāʾ, and wāw were used for long or short (!) vowels.
Once vowelling (and "hamza-ing") were common, some of the added letters were superfluous ‒ see on the left and below.
Orthographic differences concern mostly alif, yāʾ, wāw and hamza (whether it is represented in the rasm by one of these vowel letters <because in the original Hiǧāzi pronounciation the "vanished hamza" had prolongated the originaly short vowels> or by the independent letter head of ʿain.)
In the King Fuad Edition, the Šamarlī edition, in the editions written by ʿUṯmān Ṭaha silent letters (that are not muted by prosody) are marked with a circel, when they are always silent, by an ovale, when pronounced when the reader stops after them ‒ for whatever reason; silent when connected to the next word.
Here a reason why: because the pure rasm could be read in different ways. So before the "invention" of vowel signs/dots and the head of ʿAin for hamza, a vowel letter was added ‒ this by the way ‒ is a reason for adding a vowel letter for a short vowel.
The personal pronoun انا (I) is an other example: you could say it has two alifs, but normally no /ā/, the first is hamza, the last helps not to confuse it with the particles ʾinna, ʾanna, ʾin ان
Here 4:83 with two words one after the other with the same rasm where it not for an "added" letter
In the next word yāʾ was "added" before kasra was common, to signal to the reader that the hamza is to be read as /ʾi/ ‒ /ʾī/ when the reader stops after it ‒ for whatever reason.
The pioneer on the matter
was Brockett ....
I have already posted on this matter. Allow me to added from the mentioned Muqnī
But not only alif can be otiose. So can yāʾ.
the monster fatḥa is no vowel sign, bur signals that there is a note on that word on the margin (see above)
now from Morocco, the model for the Gizeh print of 1024/5 ‒ if I am right
in prints/mss. from the Ottoman empire and Persia there is only one yāʾ
On 51:47 با يٮد al-Arkati writes:
The first MSI (Muṣḥaf Standar Indonesia 1983) had only one tooth بايۡدٍ
the second (MSI 2002) two: بايۡٮدٍ
I have to check what the third (MSI 2016) has.
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