Thread by @PhDniX

Whenever one learns Classical Arabic, they are usually told that it has 6 vowels, three short ones: /a/, /i/, /u/, and their long counterparts: /ā/, /ī/, /ū/.

But many Quranic reading traditions have more than those, a short thread on the vowel systems of the seven readers. 🧵

Every single reader may have an overlong pronunciation of every single long vowel the reader has. These overlong vowels are phonetically conditioned and therefore non-phonemic. They occur:
1. Before hamza /ʔ/: [samāāʔ] /samāʔ/
2. In super heavy syllables: [dāābbah] /dābbah/

Ibn Kaṯīr simply what we would think of as the Classical Arabic vowel system. The only difference is it has the non-phonemic overlong vowels. But I've argued in a recent paper that that is actually a feature more broadly in Classical Arabic prose.

brill.com/view/journals/…

The next simplest vowel system is found with the most popular reading today, that of Ḥafṣ (transmitted of ʿĀṣim). He has all the same vowels, but has a single lexical case of ʾimālah /ē/, exclusively in the word maǧrēhā (quran.com/11/41).

Ḥamzah has many cases of /ē/. He also has a vowel /ǣ/:
1. /rāri/ > [rǣri] (allophonic)
2. /ē/ stands before the feminine ending: التورية [at-tawrǣh] (maybe allophonic?)
3. Some lexical exceptions: al-qahhǣri and al-bawǣri (phonemic, cf. an-nāhāri, al-ǧawāri)

Al-Kisāʾī has /ē/ in many places. He also has /ȳ/, e.g qȳla "it was said" (and in lost transmissions /y/, /byjūt/ "houses").
He has a phonetically conditioned allomorph of the feminine ending /eh#/, but in same environments other /ah/ doesn't become /-eh/, so it's phonemic.

Warš, transmitter of Nāfiʿ has extensive use of /ǣ/. He has /ē/ only in the Sūrah starting letters ṭā-hē (quran.com/20/). I suppose it depends on your theoretical framework whether that is phonemic. Warš also has a (limited) used of the phoneme /ȳ/.

Hišām and Ibn Ḏakwān, transmitters of Ibn ʿĀmir have the same vowel system, e.g. Hišām has /ē/ in lexically determined positions (e.g. ʿēbidūna in quran.com/109/ and ONLY in that Sūrah, same word elsewhere has /ā/). Ibn Ḏakwān, e.g. in ʿimrēn. Both have /ȳ/.

Šuʿbah, the other transmitter of ʿĀṣim, has a couple of lexically determined cases of /ē/, but different words than Ḥafṣ. He has a couple of cases lexical ultrashort vowels: /ladŭnī/ (Q18:2), /niʕĭmmā/ (Q2:271), but he has no /ă/.

Qālūn, the other transmitter of Nāfiʿ, has all three ultrashort vowel values, adding, /taʕăddū/ and /yaxăssimūna/ and /yahăddī/. Like Warš, he has limited use of /ȳ/, but unlike Warš has no /ē/ or /ǣ/ at all.

ʾAbū ʿAmr's transmitters differ somewhat on the use of ultrashort vowels, al-Dūrī using them more consistently. ʾAbū ʿAmr has /ǣ/ that occurs only in words of certain shapes and lexical positions. It has a raised allophone [ē] after /r/, but /ē/ shows up in lexical places too.

So the readers general do not have the boring Classical 6-vowel system, (only 1 with that system). All others range between 7 and 11 phonemic vowels!

Arab grammarians describe 1 more vowel: /ō/. This appears to have once been in use, but none of the canonical readers retain it.

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Addendum: I should have mentioned explicitly that I based this description on the Taysīr, but even with that it looks like I missed a vowel for Qālūn's system. He uses /ē/ only once, in /hērin/ (Q9:109).