Showing posts with label carelessness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label carelessness. Show all posts

Tuesday, 11 August 2026

yet another mistake in KFE1924

The maker of the 1924 Cairo edition evidently did not understand the function of the mutating small alif: it is not a vowel sign but turns yāʾ or wāw into alif — in other words, a letter that looks like a yāʾ is an alif (alif bi‑šakl al‑yāʾ). In early Warš prints the mutat­ing alif is correct­ly placed above the yāʾ; the Cairo edition, by con­trast, places the sign some­times, correct­ly some­times not.
top: Warš prints; second: KFE; third UT0; fourth: Muṣḥaf al-Muʿal­lim, Tunis; 5thTaj
It should sit above yāʾ, not after it. In Moroc­co this is always the case, in KFE it is some­times like it should be, some­times not.
Mikāl is dif­ferent from the others, be­cause Warš and Qālun (Tunis) have /mi­kāʾil/. While here there is a hover­ing sign and a tooth/نبرة/let­ter, in the other cases there is just one letter. What KFE and UT are doing is just wrong: they often have use­less tooth/نبرة !
This is the same scribal incon­sis­ten­cy, likely due to care­less­ness, that Otto Pretzl had already noticed.
I have added a last row in IPak. Here the dagger is neither a small alif, nor a mutat­ing sign, but a ā-vowel sign; it belongs to the con­sonant; the tooth/nabra is mute.
So, it is not only Abū ʿUmar ʿUbaidah Muḥam­mad Saliḥ al-Banki who does not care, KFE and UT are not perfect either.

Here the last words from KHO, MNQ and Arya­mehr. Yes, Otto­mans write the yāʾ with its dots even when it stands for /ā/, yes, Persians put the marks somewhere (in the right order, but whereever).
not convined yet?
Below is more to see: Algerian Warš: the mutat­ing small alif ON the tooth, KFC/UT Warš comme si, comme ça, UT-Ḥafṣ just bad:
/ṣalāt/ is not the problem, nor is /abnē/ UT-Warš – with them I just show that with wau and with end-yāʾ even UT places the mutating alif proper­ly: /mikaʾil/ has the /ī/ after the tooth – why?;
the rest shows that KFC/UT (and KFE before) write with­out thinking first; they have no idea were the mu­tat­ing small alif should be placed.


































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a bombshell

Morteza Karimi-Nia has published a book Codex Mashhad , and a web site . Most interest­ing: Sura order like Codex Masʿud Orthography The o...