yet another mistake made in 1924

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 line: early Warš prints; second: KFE; third UT0; last: Muṣḥaf al-Muʿallim from Tunis
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 in the last line (Qālun, Tunis) it is /mikāʾil/. While here there is a hovering sign and a tooth/نبرة/letter, in the other case 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 notised.
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