Qurʾānic Orthography

Most people think that there is ONE way to write the qurʾān, that if we leave the different qiraʾāt aside and ignore the style of writing, all copies of the qurʾān are the same.
And that they are written alright.

The opposite is true:
there are many different qurʾanic "ortho"graphies and none is ortho/right.

b, k, l, m, n, t ... are fine. Paleo-Linguists argue about ض ص ط ظ

But for modern readers only the vowels are proble­matic: short and long vowels.

Basically there are two systems:
an Indian system with seven vowel signs (a ā i ī u ū x)
an African System which needs for each long vowel a vowel sign plus the correspond­ing lengthening letter.

The African system is today common in the Arab world. When there is no leng­then­ing letter (waw, yāʾ, alif) after ḍamma, kasra, fatḥa in the rasm, a small letter is added. When the rules of pro­sody require an "ī" al­though no yāʾ is in the rasm, a small yāʾ barī (i.e with the tail to the front) is added.

But when the rules of prosody require a (written/long) yāʾ to be shortened,
that is not reflected in the text.
I am shocked because the lengthening of vowels required by prosody IS shown.
I had no problem with sticking to the base letters, but adding read­ing helps sometimes defies God's logic.
(Turks and Persians do never show the niceties of quranic as­simi­lation. ‒ That I can under­stand.)
(Turks note leng­thened ī, but not leng­thened ū ‒ some­thing corrected in all Indo­nesian and some Iranian reprints.)

Indians, Turks, Persians, Indo­nesi­ans are not happy with this. The Arab attitude "every­body knows that these letters do not leng­then the vowel at these places" sounds arrogant in non-Arab hears.

In XXX:10 /ʾasāʾŭ s-sūʾā/ in India (second line) and Indonesia (last, right) there is no vowell sign about the wau in /ʾasāʾŭ/, hence it is not pronounced (just as the following alif).
In Kerala (first, right) and Turkey (fourth line) that wau is silent because it is only the "seat" of hamza (there would be written "madd" under­neath if it were to be pronounced).
In the new Iranian orthography (fifth line, right) all silent letter are pink.
But in the third line (right: Madina: ʿUṯmān Ṭaha; left: Damascus: Dār al-Maʿrifa) there is no Silent-Sign above the wau.
The same in the last line, left (Tunis: Nous-mêmes) ‒ wrong as I see it.
But two of the taǧwīd-Editions based on UT do show the silence of that wau: On the top, left from Bairut (blueish for silence), on the fifth line, left from Damascus (grey triange above for silence).

When shortening doesn't follow a general rule, but applies just to parti­cular places within the text = when a vowel is short because it must rhyme with lines before and after, this IS reflected in the Arab-African text. So why not: all the time?

Here you see words from an Indian manuscript (from Surat Hūd) in which ONLY the vowel SIGNS count, the "lengthening" vowel letters are IGNORED (hence: NO sign above or below) ‒ al-farīqaini in the last line has jazm above the yāʾ because in the diph­thong yāʾ is NOT silent.
((Added later: I first had seen just one manu­script from around 1800 with the sign-only ortho­graphy, by now I have seen some more ‒ up to the time when litho­graphs became common, litho­graphs with the modern/ mixed way of writing long vowel letters)

on the margin I added doctored versions: signs were moved to a place easier to read for the modern reader

The modern Indian system (black on white background) is a mix of the old con­sistent system and the African one: when the CORRES­PONDING letter follows a vowel sign, the SHORT vowel sign is used (as in Africa), only when there is a diffe­rent letter or no "leng­thening" letter at all, the long vowel sign is used.


In 7:103, 10:75, 11:97 and 43:46 (and 10:83 with an added mīm for plural) pro­nounciation and rasm are the same; there is only disagreement on whether the alif or the yāʾ is mute:
wa-malaʾihī
IPak: وَمَلَا۠ئِهٖ
Q52: وَمَلَإِي۠هِۦ
In the rasm there are matres (ḥurūf al-madd) for both /a/ and /i/,
‒ indeed here letters (not consonants!) stand for short vowels,
  because there was no other way to notice them.
in India alif is silent (the short fatḥa is valid, not the alif), yāʾ carries hamza,
in Arabia alif "carries" hamza below, yāʾ is silent.

In 21:34 ʾa-faʾin
IPak: افَا۠ئِنْ
Q52: اَفإي۠ن
India and osm/Tur make the alif silent
(Indians used to leave the alif without any sign, now they put the silent making circle,
Turks write qaṣr underneath)
for Arabs alif carries hamza, yāʾ is silent.
Muṣṭafā Naẓīf in one of his manu­scripts (the 604 pages berkenar one) just drops the otiose letter. اَفَإنْ
It does not help to observe that in his other maṣāḥif he has the super­fluous letter. The 604 page muṣḥaf is often re­printed (not as often as the 522 page one, but in different countries) without "correc­tion".
Similar 6:24 min-nabaʾi

In Q52 alif "carries" hamza and /i/, yāʾ is silent and in IPak alif is silent, yāʾ carries hamza and /i/. ­

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 (qi­ra­ʾa), ductus, 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 each verse is followed by a num­ber, whether alter­native count­ing systems are in­dicated, 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 Le Dictionaire de l'Academie, Meriam-Webster, 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, and how hamza at the start of words is written. I am par­ticular­ly inter­ested in prints.

---

There are two main spellings/set of rules: African (Maghrebi, Anda­lusian, 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).

this two signs modell cor­responds to the view of the gram­ma­ti­ci­ans that there a haraka, lengthened by a ḥarf al-madd, while (follow­ing) Asian mo­dell may reflect the Sankrit model of matras

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 waw, 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; above 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.