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I discovered a new letter of the Arabic alphabet in the early Islamic period in Quranic manuscripts!

In modern Arabic script jīm/ḥāʾ/ḫāʾ all have the same basic letter shape.

However, in several early manuscripts final jīm is straight while ḥāʾ/ḫāʾ is curved.
My article on this discovery has just come out in al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā (Open Access!)
middleeastmedievalists.com/wp-content/upl…

This contrast is a continuation of the pre-Islamic ancestor of the Arabic script, Nabataean/Nabataeo-Arabic, that distinguishes the jīm from the ḥāʾ/ḫāʾ as well.
The whole issue of the journal is Open Access, and I share the volume with contributions by @therealsidky
and @RachelSchine
and others! Go check it out!
middleeastmedievalists.com/al-%ca%bfusur-…
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Marijn van Putten
@PhDniX
The Quranic reading traditions are a great source of information of Classical Arabic in the early Islamic period. For this reason it makes sense that Jonathan Owens in his "A Linguistic History of Arabic" draws upon it frequently, but also badly.

A thread with annoyances:
Owens (pg.40) cites al-Farrāʾ as saying ʿĀṣim and al-ʾAʿmaš have -uh (or -Vh) for the 3sg.m. form. But this is an oversimplification and misreading of the evidence.

The forms al-Farrāʾ mentions are yuʾaddi-h, nuwalli-h, ʾarji-h and yara-h (i.e. not -uh at all!).
These are all readings of Šuʿbah ʿan ʿĀṣim (al-Farrāʾ does not seem to have been familiar with Ḥafṣ' transmission of ʿĀṣim, except for yara-h, which in the canonical transmissions is not transmitted from ʿĀṣim at all (only Hišām), but Ibn Mujāhid reports it.
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Marijn van Putten
@PhDniX
I don't know when this happened but @UBLeiden's Or. 298, the earliest Arabic paper manuscript, is now digitized!
Dated to 252AH/866 AD, this Ġarīb al-Ḥadīṯ by ʾAbū ʿUbayd al-Qāsim b. Sallām was copied mere decades after the author's death (d. 223).

A thread on the orthography
Being a manuscript this early, it contains all kinds of wonderfully archaic features which remind one somewhat Quranic orthography, although it is already clearly transitional between the archaic orthography of the Quran and later Classical orthography.
Especially names frequently get spelled defectively.

al-qāsim as القسم
ʾibrāhīm as ابرهيم
ʾismāʿīl as اسمعيل
ʾisḥāq as اسحق
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Marijn van Putten
@PhDniX
This manuscript is Or. 251 held in the Leiden University Library. It is a typical Maghrebi Quran manuscript. Besides its distinctive style it also has a typically Maghrebi manner of vocalising.

Interestingly, Maghrebi print qurans today continue many of these practices. Thread>
The reading of this manuscript is that of Warš ʿan Nāfiʿ. This reading is dominant in Maghrebi Qurans, and it is indeed still the dominant reading of the Quran in North-Africa. The other canonical transmitter of Nāfiʿ, Qālūn is popular in Libya.
One thing that instantly strikes the reader as remarkable is the treatment of the lām-ʾalif: Maghrebi Qurans consider the left leg the lām and the right the ʾalif and vocalize as such. This is the original treatment:
e.g. ʾillā, hāʾulāʾi
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