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.


In the 1970 the Tāǧ Ltd Co added a page at the end of their editions
here as always you have to click on the image, then with the secondary mouse on it, choose "open in a new tab" and then "+"
Because the type writer is not the best:
المصاحف بجدة من زيادة الالف في كلمة "الانتم“ من الاية رقم ١٣ سورة الحشر
نحيطكم انه بالمقارنه بين طبعة هذا المصحف وطبعات المصاحف الاخرى ظهر أن زيادة الالف
تنفرد بها الطبعة المذكوره ومن الجائز ان تكون من قبيل الكلمات التي زيدت فيها الالف رسمًا لا نطقًا مثل
لااوضعو" [التوبة: 47] "او لاذبحنه" [النمل: 21] وغيرها من الكلمات التى سردها ابو عمر الداني في المقنع حيث قال

The pioneer on the matter was Brockett .... I have already posted on this matter. Allow me to added from the mentioned Muqnī


Interestingly the mufti (a decendent of ʿAbdal-Wahhāb) does not only mention an early authority (as orientalist scholars do), but adds a recent authority, the chief Reader/Recitor of Egypt al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād who had made the King Fuad Edition of 1924/5

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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