Thread by @PhDniX

I've been spending a lot of time lately looking at (non-Quranic) Arabic manuscripts, and have been annoyed how few adequate descriptions exist of central orthographic features. So I'll be doing some threads in the coming days trying to give an adequate description!
First: ʾihmāl

ʾihmāl literally "disregard" is the process of marking explicitly letter shapes that do not receive dotting. For example the ح ḥ is only distinct from خ ḫ and ج ǧ by NOT having a dot. In those cases a miniature ح is written below the letter to make explicit the dot is absent.

Such "mimicry" occurs not just for the ḥāʾ, but also for other undotted letters such as the ع ʿayn, ص ṣād, س sīn, ط ṭāʾ.

Miniature sīn is actually quite rare, and a much more common practice is found...

The use of small crescent above the س sīn, to mark that it is not a ش šīn. This same semi-circle is also frequently used above the ر rāʾ to mark that is is not a ز zāy.

For ر rāʾ and د dāl you also occasionally see it marked by a dot below.

For sīn one also finds the use of three dots not *above* the three denticles as with the šīn, but below. This is seen a lot in Or. 298. Some of these strategies are sometimes used side-by-side. this multitude of options is not always mutually exclusive.

The Ibn al-Bawwāb Quran (not non-Quranic, but in a non-Quranic bookhand), for example, uses both semi-circle and three dots for sīn. And I just ran into an example that uses both!

The use of a miniature hāʾ on top of word-final ه hāʾ to absolutely disambiguate it from the ة tāʾ marbūṭah occurs sometimes as well.

The miniature kāf inside the final/isolated ك kāf is in fact also a kind of pseudo-ihmāl. There's no letter like it, but the ل lām is fairly close, so a miniature medial kāf could be written on top. Ironically this only one becomes obligatory (despite being least ambiguous)

These practices are fairly early. Once we get to our earliest dated paper literary manuscript (Leiden Or. 298, 252 AH) it is clearly already part of the scribal practice. But these practices probably did not all develop contemporaneously, and there's certainly regional variation

To my knowledge, there is no serious study into these regional or diachronic trends, even though it strikes me as a prime chance of putting palaeography to good use...

Dot below rāʾ and dāl are the most ancient, as they already appear in Hijazi and Kufic Qurans.

This kind of marking can be extremely redundant, but in manuscripts that have very little dotting, having an ihmāl sign and knowing how to interpret it can be just as valuable as having other kinds of dots, so it's useful to be aware of them!
More orthography threads on the way!

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