Sunday, 9 March 2025

numbers after each verse

I tend to think: marking the end of verses is important,
not putting a number each time,
because the end-of-verse-sign imply the numbers.
I admit: there are two things that make is complicated
In Muṣḥaf al-Muḫallalātī the end-of-verse of all seven canonical systems are indicated, so the numbers are not that easily countable, but they are there.
In some maṣāḥif the same sign is use of end-of-verse and for an ob­ligat­ory stop within a verse,
the "fake" ends not being counted in the number-of-verses given in the sura-title-box ‒ some­thing clear only to the experts.
Muhammad Hozien has (for the time being) established the first printed muṣ­ḥaf with numbers after each verse: Istanbul 1298/1881
But
I still do not see the big difference to Hafez Osman, the Elder putt­ing an ع at the end of each tenth verse and an عشر at the margin:
or Muḥammad Amīn Rušdī using the abjad ten: ے
above the last word of the tenth, twentieth, thirdith ... verse there is a ے
In the manuscript there were no numbers; they were added 1370/1951 for the ʿIrāqī State print.

Attention
Sometimes the same (or similar) sign can stand for different things.
While small ʿain with /ʿašara/ at the margin says: 10 or 20 or 30 ..., it can stand for rukūʿ;
above, in the last line, at the end of verse 29, one just has to know ...
... on the next image, i.e. in India there is a big ʿain on the margin with num­bers in it:

To another example that one and the same sign can stand for different things.
The sign is called the short one/ quṣair or the dagger/ ḫanǧar
In the now common Western, Andalusian, African system
it stands for a "missing" vowel letter, an alif needed to lengthen a fatḥa not in the rasm;
four times in the first line, twice in the second ‒ twice, because the third quṣair is not a fill-in alif, but a con­ver­ter/changer of the alif in the shape of yāʾ into a "noraml" alif;
in the last word the vowel letter is not missing, it is just ambiguous.
In the East (India, Indonesia, Persia, Ottoman Empire ...) the same sign is neither a replacement vowel nor a vowel con­verter but a vowel sign, a long fatḥa (or turned fatḥa). While in the West there is the vowel sign fatḥa plus a leng­thening letter sign, in the East, there is just a long vowel sign.
In the West there are only three vowel signs (plus sukūn) hence a lengthening vowel is necessary.
In the East there are three short, three long vowel signs (plus sukūn).
looks the same, but is not the same, letter in the West, vowel sign in the East:
And there is more diversity:
While in the now standard IndoPak system this /ā/ stands only when no alif follows, there are spell­ing that have it, even if an alif follows:
This is Hūd 22-25 from an Indian manu­script from around 1800: you find the long vowel marks ir­respec­tive of what follows:
BTW, the red dots are end-of-verse-markers, and after /taḏakirūn/ there is a rukūʿ, cf. the ʿain on the margin.
The same text according to the new Iranian system, in which vowel letters with­out ḥaraka ‒ with which they would be con­sonants ‒ are long vowels; the letter before the vowel does not carry a vowel sign:
On the right of the image below there are inscrip­tions on buildings in Aleppo,
on the left from a muṣḥaf written by an-Nairizī;
both use the quṣair irrespective of an alif follo­wing or not:

Below from the ʿIrāqi State muṣḥaf of 1951:
again the dagger even when followed by an alif
and they make mistakes: four times they both put a normal fatḥa and this long fatḥa; the co-existence of different systems confused them:






























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