He tweeted that maṣāḥif had scriptio continua until print came:
as "printed" is when the turning point starts to happen; as has been pointed out expertly and often by @ThomasMiloNL, printed Qurans suddenly start to have word spacing ... to form of what handwritten Naskhi Qurans look like, before the technical limitations, and assumptions of printers introduced spaces into the QuranHe goes on:
And this is true for most Arabic fonts today.I fail to understand, how one can be sooo stupid. That there is a space/spacium in a font, does not force anyone to use them. Actually, in most well-made fonts there are six different spaces: from zero width, to hair width, digit width to ... Pakistani coranologist advice to use the sixth space, with gives a traditional (continuous) impression, without lacking some extra space.
van Putten gets everything wrong:
the change has nothing to do with print:
just look at the Indian, Ottoman, Qajar prints.
Not because of technical limitations ‒ as van Putten and Tom Milo write again and again ‒, but because after more and more young men had been to public schools and were used to read newspapers, reformers wanted to make reading the qurʾān easier, wanted to make the holy book accessible.
Therefore, they used few staggered ligatures: instead of having to read from top-down AND from right to left, with the vowel signs placed in the right order but not always near "their" letters, almost all letters were on the baseline, the vowel signs exactly above or below.
Aḥmed Lakhḍar-Ghazāl wants them to the left because they are spoken after the consonant.
Putting a space between words was a deliberate choice, not technical necessity.
M. van der Putt likes to criticize famous scholars:
In "Qur'ans of the Umayyads", François Déroche makes multiple references to the idea that the use of "Scriptio Continua" is typical for early Qurans and especially typical of Qurans in the old Hijazi style. ... [Déroche] seems to imply that Arabic previously had the ability to express spaces, but that these were dropped in favour of scriptio continua; perhaps to be more like the Romans. There is nothing that suggests this is the case. Arabic had scriptio continua from the start.Actually, Déroche mentions scriptio continua twice and never says what van der Putt says he implies: that the writers of Hijazi mss. imitated Greeks or Romans. His support on the subject is Werner Diem who links the Arab writing with the Nabateans, not the Romans. I fail to see that Déroche sees writing without wider white space between words than within words (after a non-joining letter) as characteristic for Ḥijazi only. Since there are no multiples references it is not very clear. van der Putt could be right, but that is far from clear.
Unsurpassed nonsense is "the ability to express spaces."
Of course, writers of Arabic are able to put space between words, but I doubt that they express spaces by doing so.
What the Dutch professor could mean: the ability to express word boundaries by increased space ‒ something completely different.
For that it would help to point out that space is not necessary, because ‒ similar to English capital letters signaling a name, a title or the beginning of a new sentence, Arabic has final letters signaling the end of a word.
((It is a capital mistake by Unicode to have decreed that Arabic has
only 28 letters, 22 of which have four forms, the others two.
Actually, Arabic has 28 normal (similar to lower case) letters
plus 22 final letters (23 counting tāʾ marbūṭa separately):
The writer decides whether he ends the word with a final letter
or adds a (pronominal) suffix (or a plural ending, whatever).
While these (normal <‒> final) are different letters,
the difference between end or isolate, between middle or initial
is a (graphic) consequence of the preceding letter:
not a decision by the writer but a function of the letter on the right of it.
The Arab Typewriter
Greek, Hebrew have distinct final letters (English, German s [≠ ſ]), just as English has capital letters, but Arabic is mis-encoded.))
And Arabic has an extra word separator.
Although stupid Marijn claims again and again that the Arabic writing system has only consonants, it has only letters (ḥurūf).
Some of the letters signal a vowel or a consonant, others always consonant(s).
And alif is used as end-of-word-mark:
after waw ‒ there is no final waw ‒ alif signals: end of word;
this was helpful because both alif and waw are often the first letter of a word unit (one letter particles like wa-, fa-, ta-, ka- form a graphic unit with the following word); by putting an extra alif after (otherwise) final waw the border between the words runs between the two alifs, as there can not be two alifs within a word.
To make this clear: every language has con-sonants, but a writing system has con-sonants, once it has sonants/vowels. Greek had letters that WERE vowel-letter, so it has con-sonants, but Arabic has just letters, letters with can stand for consonants, some letters that (can) signal: end of word (or accusative or femininity).
