While looking at the verse counts reported in the headers of Arabe 5122 I ran into a headscratcher: Sūrat al-Sajdah (Q32) (called tanzīl al-Sajdah here) is marked here as having 52 (!) verses. Traditional counts either have 29 (Basran count) or 30, so what happened here?
Let us first confirm that the manuscript does not have some kind of bizarre count. In between this Sūrah and the next, one encounters 2 10 verse markers and 3 5 verse markers. The actual count must therefore be more than 25 and less than 30 (so likely the Basran 29).
So what is going on? I started thinking: wait a minute, there is another Sūrah that historically is ALSO called al-Sajdah, or more specifically Ḥā-Mīm al-Sajdah, namely Fuṣṣilat (Q41). Could it be that our ornamenter got confused and mixed up the counts of the two Sajdahs?
The answer indeed appears to be yes. If we go over to Ḥā-Mīm al-Sajdah (which is indeed the name he gives it) and check its verse count we indeed find that it is 52 in the count of this manuscript! . So it indeed seems like they got their Sajdah's confused!
This perhaps reveals something about how the process of header ornamentation worked in the time of production (ca. mid 3rd c. AH). Did our scribe have a list of the Sūrah titles with their respective names and when they got to Sajdah their eye fell on the wrong one and copied it?
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As promised, here's a follow up to my series of ongoing comparisons between Nabataean Arabic and Old Hijazi. This time we will look at the Deictic system within the Arabic of the Nabataeans and the grammarians.
The medieval Arabic grammarians report an astounding amount of variation in the deictic system. And a good amount of this is dialectal variation.
The base deictics are: m.sg. ḏā f.sg. tī, ḏī, ḏih, ḏihī
pl. ʾulāʾ, ʾulā (or ʾulē)
loc. hunā
The grammarians tell us that the Hijaz is that the near deixis 'this, these, here' is *always* combined with a presentative hā-. Thus hā-ḏā "this (masc.),", hā-ḏihī "this (fem.)", hā-ʾulāʾi "these" and hāhunā "here".
Farrāʾ only reports the difference explicitly for the plural
Yesterday I gave an introduction on Nabataean Arabic and Old Hijazi and the Quran Arabic. Now, let's look at some of the linguistic features that both connect and differentiate these ancient dialects form one another!
One striking commonality between Nabataean and Old Hijazi is the definite article, which in both cases was /al-/. Today, this definite article is almost universal. Only in Yemen do we find forms such as /am-/. But in pre-Islamic times a vast majority of different forms existed.
In Safaitic inscriptions, which reflect other pre-islamic dialects of Arabic, we usually find <h->, <ʾ-> but sometimes also <hn-> and only occasionally <ʾl->.
I was asked a while ago to explain what historical linguists of Arabic mean when we told about 'Old Hijazi' and 'Nabataean Arabic' and how these relate to one another and where the language of the Quran fits in. So this thread will address these questions!
Nabataean Arabic is the language researchers suppose many of the inhabitants of the Nabataean Kingdom spoke. The Nabataeans, as a rule, used Aramaic as their administrative language. The script they used was a form of the Imperial Aramaic script. This script evolved over time.
Eventually this script evolves all the way to what we know as the modern Arabic script. This is a gradual development, and it is not possible to pinpoint where the 'Nabataean Aramaic' script ends and the 'Arabic script' begins.
In vocalized Kufic Qurans, as a rule only 3 things are consistently marked: hamzah, final short vowels, and ʾiʿrāb. Tanwīn is marked by writing the ʾiʿrāb twice. Occasionally the indefinite accusative is missing, e.g. ḥanīfan musliman. I figured out why! 🧵
Taking the Quran of Amajur as our base, we can make a list of places where the tanwīn is used, and places where it isn't. Let's also make note of the word that follows (that will become important).
Without dots:
-ʾarbāban (min)
-yahūdiyyan (lā)
-naṣrāniyyan (walākin)
An interesting orthographic feature of early Quranic vocalisation is that it differentiates word-initial ʾa from ʾā by the position of the fatḥah. For ʾa the fatḥah is to the RIGHT of the ʾalif and for ʾā it is to the LEFT.
ʾahli l-kitābi
ʾāmanū
This is a bit puzzling, because conceptually, Arab grammarians think of ʾāmanū to consist of hamzah followed by fatḥah and then ʾalif. So it is rather odd that the dot that denotes the hamzah comes after the ʾalif.
Al-Dānī in his muḥkam, a description of vocalisation agrees:
"All the dotters of ʿIrāq disagree with the people of Medina and others (notably Andalus and Maghreb) on the word-initial hamzah carrying a fatḥah which has an ʾalif after it within a single word, for example: ʾāmana, ʾādama and ʾāzara. They place it after the ʾalif.
One of the great mysteries of the Quranic reading traditions are their many phonetic irregularities, that seem to have no purpose except to show off some grammatical oddity. One of these is the ʾimālah of al-kēfīrīna. Ibn Ḫālawayh in his Ḥuǧǧah has an interesting discussion. 🧵
The plural of 'disbelievers', besides the now popular kuffār, is also kāfirūna in the Quran. In the genitive and accusative this becomes kāfirīna. Some readers read this (and ONLY this) as kēfirīna.
This is the reading of: ʾAbū ʿAmr, al-Dūrī ← al-Kisāʾī and Ruways ← Yaʿqūb.
In his al-Ḥuǧǧah fī l-Qirāʾāt al-Sabʿ, Ibn Ḫālawayh sets out to rationalize and explain the practices of the seven readers canonized by his teacher, Ibn Mujāhid. He also discusses al-Kēfirīna. Let's translate and give commentary along the way.