Shortened Vowels

In the qurʾān there are thousands of vowels pro­nounced short, although written as long.
The most common words are انا۠ /ʾana/ (zero above alif = mute unless pause directly after) and أُوْلَٰٓئِكَ /ulaika/ (circle above waw = always mute)
‒ according to the now common Arab Qurʾānic ortho­graphy intro­duced Giza1924.
‒ In IndoPak they have no vowel sign at all;
   in Turkey qaṣr is written beneath them
The most common rule is:
when the last sound of a word is a long vowel
and the first sound of the next word ‒ after a silent alif or direct ‒
is an unvowelled consonant (ḥarf sākin), this consonant trans­forms the syllable before to a closed one --> shortens the vowel.
‒ The ḥarf sākin can be a single letter or the first of geminized ones (a pair, double, taṣdīd).

And there are some words shortened because of rhyme,
e.g. in Surah Al-Ahzab (33) and Surah Al-Insan (76)

In these suras most verses end in /a/,
the few verses ending in ا get shortened:

[٠٣٣] الأحزاب

٠١٠إِذۡ جَآءُوكُم مِّن فَوۡقِكُمۡ وَمِنۡ أَسۡفَلَ مِنكُمۡ وَإِذۡ زَاغَتِ ٱلۡأَبۡصَٰرُ وَبَلَغَتِ ٱلۡقُلُوبُ ٱلۡحَنَاجِرَ وَتَظُنُّونَ بِٱللَّهِ ٱلظُّنُونَا۠

٠٦٦ يَوۡمَ تُقَلَّبُ وُجُوهُهُمۡ فِی ٱلنَّارِ يَقُولُونَ يَٰلَيۡتَنَآ أَطَعۡنَا ٱللَّهَ وَأَطَعۡنَا ٱلرَّسُولَا۠

٠٦٧وَقَالُوا۟ رَبَّنَآ إِنَّآ أَطَعۡنَا سَادَتَنَا وَكُبَرَآءَنَا فَأَضَلُّونَا ٱلسَّبِيلَا۠

and 76:15 وَيُطَافُ عَلَيۡهِم بِـَٔانِيَةٖ مِّن فِضَّةٖ وَأَكۡوَابٖ كَانَتۡ قَوَارِيرَا۠

‒ ­

tajwīd maṣāḥif

The letters of the qurʾān do not exactely tell you how to pronounce the text.
Some vowels have to be lengthened, others naselized,
some consonants are emphati­cal or esp. clearly pro­nounced.
Quite a lot of written letters are not pro­nounced.
Some of these oral phenonema are reflected in the "normal" text.
According to Q52 a waṣl-sign above an alif and a circle above any letter say: Do not pronounce!
This is expressed in Indo-Pak by absence of any sign.

– Unfortunately today some Indians set the silent-circle, thus deluting their own clear system.

(Waterfaal Islamic Institute wants to make it better, using NO sign for the Q52 circle, putting a circle for the Q52 ovale, but some­times they put the wrong sign ‒ alas.)

There are many different prints that use colour to distinguish how to pro­nounce:

The image above is from Dar al-Maʿrifa in Bairut, formally Damascus. In Verse 16 not all silent letters are grey (they think the waṣl says it, so they leave the alif black, al­thought it is mute (by the same logic letters below a circle would have to be black):

In verse 8 DaM (Dar al-Maʾrifa), Nous-mêmes (Nm) from Tunis, and Hasenat from Turkey colour the nūn from /man/ before /yaqūl/ because it is assimi­lated (and Nm puts a šadda above the yāʾ to which the nūn is assimilated).
On the other hand, DaM and Nm do not grey out the alif of [al-nās] marked as silent by Hasenat and Merkaz Ṭabo­Našr, which does not bother about assimila­tion. (Nm does not even grey the lām assimilated to nūn!)

the two above are from Nous-mêmes/Hanibal and from Tehran.
Here four times [min/man] from Indonesia, Bairut/Damascus (Muʾassasat al-Īmān) and twice from Lahore, Pakistani Punjab (Qudratullah and Hammad) plus the 13liner from Taj coloured by Madrasah.co.uk

in these examples all silent letters are coloured as silent:

The two pages above are from Turkey (Hasenat) and from Indo­nesia (Mushaf Indo­nesia Standar Warna).
In the first line on the next image (Nm) do not mark the diffe­ren­ce bet­ween /fī/ and /fĭ/ assuming that their (Arab) readers make it auto­matically right.
Muʾassasat al-Īmān (in Bairut), Indonesians and Iranians do make the difference.
(Note that the Indonesians do not use colour for silent letters trusting the Indian system: absence of any sign = mute.) (Note that the Iranians in the last line do not mark the assimilation of mīm to mīm.)

above the pages from Lahore, and the page written for the 13liner of Taj Com Ltd. coloured for Madrasah.co.uk.

And for good measure from yet another Lahore company: Pak:

and from the Islamic Academy in Texas (text written by Mahmud Ahmad ʿAbdal-Ḥaqq)

­‒

Giza 1924 ‒ better ‒ worse

The Egyptian Goverment Edition printed in Gizeh in 1924 was the first offset printed mushaf,
It was type set (not type printed).
It used smaller subset of the Amiriyya font not because the Amiriyya laked the techni­cal pos­sibi­lity for more elaborate ligatures,
((in 1881 when they printed a muṣḥaf for the first time,
  they used 900 different sorts, in 1906 they reduced it to about 400,
  which they used in the backmatter of the 1924 muṣḥaf,   in the qurʾānic text even less))
but to make the qurʾānic text easier to read for state school educated (wo-)men.

They did not want that the words "climb" at the end of the line for lack of space,
nor that some letter are above following letters.

It is elegant how the word con­tin­ues a­bo­ve to the right of the base­line waw, but it is against the ra­tio­nal mind of the 20th cen­tury: every­thing must be right to left!








The kind of elegance you have with "bi-ḥam­di rab­bi­ka" is not valued by modern inte­lectu­als.

Here you see on the right /fī/, on the left /fĭ/, a distinction gone in 1924:

And here you see, with which vowel the alif-waṣl has to be read ‒
something not shown in the KFE.
In Morocco they always show with which vowel one has to start (here twice fatḥa), IF one starts al­though the first letter is alif-waṣl, the linking alif, with is normaly silent.
In Persia and in Turkey one shows the vowel only after a pause, like here:

Both in the second and third line an alif waṣl comes after "laziM", a necessary pause, so there is a vowel sign between the usual waṣl and the alif ‒ a reading help missing in Gizeh 1924.

Shortened Vowels

On four lines from al-Baqara and eight lines from Ṭaha I show if and how the KFE and IPak write vowel letters that are spoken short:

In the first two lines (and 5 + 6) ‒ both right and left ‒ yāʾ stands for /ā/ (dark pink),

in the third and fourth line only on the left there is a difference between /fī qulūbihi/ and /fĭ l-arḍi/ for /ī/ there is a ǧazm above yāʾ, for /ĭ/ there is no sign: the yāʾ is ignored.
In line 7 on the left ط  above (4) forces a pause after the verse, so the two con­sonants at the beginning of the next verse do not shorten the /ā/ to /ă/ like the following /ʿală l-ʿarši/ as can be seen left and right: no small alif either side ((BTW left the short alif is a long vowel sign = turned fatḥa; on the right it would be con­verting sign = convert yāʾ to alif)).

In lines (7+) 8/ fī/ is shortened to /fĭ/ on the left (no ǧazm sign above yāʾ), on the right readers are supposed to know.

In line 9 (right 9 to 10) we see a difference: the KFE shortens the yāʾ/alif maq­ṣūra because two consonnant letters follow, IPak (on the left) has an obligatory pause (as shown by the hamza <no waṣl> on /allāh/), hence no shortening: a straight fatḥa just as twice in line 10 (lines 10 + 11 on the right).

The last three cases are fine on both sides. The /ī/s are long, because there are madda signs above, the /ă/ is short because there is no small alif (neither a con­verting sign on the right, nor a turned fatḥa on the left).

Cairo1924 Standard Text Cairo

I am a single issue warrior. I fight against the King Fuad Edition as the Standard Qur'ān.
Corpus Coranicum, Gerd-Rüdiger Puin, and Marijn van Putten are to be con­vinced that they are wrong.
My arguments are of two kinds.
There is no Standard Edition because there are about thirty para­meters going into a muṣḥaf.
Gizeh 1924/ KFE/ Official Egyptian Print is a bad choice because of mis­takes.

Gizeh 1924—the edition Corpus Coranicum displays as the refe­rence and uses as the basis for its elec­tronic text—is bad because
‒ the use of matres lectionis is ill-defined (MOSTLY Ibn Naǧāḥ, but about 5% ad-Dānī, no reasons given, and no list published).
      the Lybian muṣḥaf follows 100% ad-Dānī,
      other Maghrebian editions follow al-Ḫarrāz, which is mostly Ibn Naǧāḥ
      Indonesia and Iran make their own mix, but at least lists are published with their choices.
      It is known that Qaṭar's and Saʿudia's rasms differ at one point each from Cairo1952.
      Nobody has given reasons for the cases, where Cairo follows ad-Dānī (not Ibn Naǧāḥ),

‒ the signalling of mute vowel letters is "too Arab", i.e. whereas missing leng­thening is always corrected by a small vowel letter, the short­en­ing (i.e. ignoring) of a vowel letter is only marked when it is "not obvious", i.e. when it is not because of a closed syllable, but for reasons of rhyme.
Many editions do not have extra signs for cor­rect­ing the length of a vowel, but Iranian, Indo­nesian, Indian editions show ALL short­ened vowels as such (or none at all).

‒ whereas Eastern editions write the end of suras as if there is a pause between suras,
    and Western editions as if the next sura follows without pause with the basmala first,
    the 1924 King Fuad Edition writes the end of the sura as if the next sura follows immediately.
This seems to be a mistake, a mistake corrected in 1952, corrected in the Sauʿdi editions and all later Editions.
   
Marijn writes of "Cairo" but he does not see,
that any muṣḥaf consists of
‒ sura (always the same)
‒ sura names (quite different)
‒ sura titel boxes (quite different)
‒ divisions like half, manzil, ǧuz, ḥizb (quite different in different editions)
‒ end of verse, numbers
‒ catch words or not, chronology or not, "amen"or not, omen or not
‒ indication of saǧadāt
‒ reading signs (assimilation, shortening, lenthening, imala ...)
‒ ḥarakāt, tašdīd, madd
‒ the basic text
Although van Putten is interested in the basic text ONLY,
he calls that "Cairo".

The left side is strange: Sura 143 doesn't exist, an-nisāʾ 143 is meant.
What we find in Cairo 46:5 is even stranger:


No trace of the word in question.
What we do find in the verse before looks very different from what van Putten calls "Cairo"

Please call it "Basic Quranic Text" "rasm plus" or anything of the sort.
"Cairo" short for "Gizeh 1924" is not a sceleton, it is a masoretic text!
a bundle of features that make a muṣḥaf!
I am sure you have no idea what "Gizeh 1924" aka "King Fu'ad" is.
You could have taken ANY muṣḥaf in the WORLD (except Turkey and Persia!)!


They all have the same Basic Quranic Text, and that's all that you are interested in here.
So please, stop calling "it" "Cairo"!