I'm always conflicted about the question of normalizing spelling in text editions. @bdaiwi_historia is right that this is standard practice for Classical Arabic text editions, but for linguists, this practice erases or distorts the history of a language, including Arabic.
Normalizing of spelling has long been a standard practice in a lot of philological fields, but in Indo-European Linguistics, my original field of study, people have been moving away from it.
This is because essential distinctions between, for example, Old Swedish and Old Icelandic only started becoming salient once text editors stopped normalizing everything towards an ideal "Old Norse" described in the grammars of the early philologists.
In Arabic, this practice had led to a rather artificial boundary at times becoming drawn between Christian and Islamic Arabic, where all kinds of orthographic practices are described as "typically Christian" because they do not show up in Classical Arabic text editions.
e.g. Christian Arabic is supposedly different from Classical Arabic in that the vocative yā before a word that starts with ʾalif is wriyten without the ʾalif, e.g. yā-ʾādam is not يا آدم but يآدم. But you find it in Ibn Ḫālawayh's kitāb al-Badīʿ. But erased in the text edition.
Because of standardization, I have no idea if this manuscript is a strange exception, or whether Middle Arabists are simply wrong in assuming that text editions are accurate representations of what you find in the manuscripts (which for Christian Arabic *is* mostly the case).
Normalizing the spelling of manuscripts towards Modern Standard Arabic norms also means that people forget or simply misunderstand the medieval norms of spelling. I have not found a single description that accurately describes the use of the Maddah sign in Classical Manuscripts.
That occasioned me to write this article on it:
brill.com/view/journals/…
But there is much more, I have a forthcoming article that uncovers different reading traditions of dalāʾil al-ḫayrāt, systematically marked in vocalized manuscripts of the texts.
It turns out that copies made in Mali closely follow the ʾuṣūl of the Quranic reader Warš. Those made in Morocco follow some principles, but deviate in other places making them a clearly distinct tradition. Turkish manuscripts follow a Ḥafṣ-like tradition.
All of that highly salient linguistic material, which teaches us something about the use and context of the manuscripts produced is lost by normalizing these spellings. There's more interesting details that I'll hopefully publish on in the future like that...
Even when text editions claim to be critical editions, and are thus supposed to systematically show the differences between manuscripts, spellings still get normalized, even if a manuscript tradition *consistently* deviates from a textual norm.
In several manuscripts of al-Dānī's taysīr, the name ʾAbū Laylā is not spelled أبو ليلى as modern norms would require, but instead they have أبو ليلا (or well, أبي ليلا). To a non-linguist this might not mean much, but for me this immediately rang a bell:
In the oldest forms of Arabic, the vowel -ā written with ʾalif and the one written with yāʾ used to be pronounced differently. The former as /ā/ (e.g. دعا as /daʿā/) while the latter as /ē/ (e.g. هدى as /hadē/). The name ليلى would thus be expected to be /laylē/...
@Safaitic noticed that in Pre-Islamic Greek transcriptions of Arabic names the distinction between /ā/ and /ē/ is consistently made. However, there was one exception: laylā!

This exceptional status of the pronunciation of laylā seems to be remembered in the ليلا spelling!
But it is difficult to make the case based on one pre-Islamic papyrus and three 17th~18th century Arabic mansucripts that ليلا is indeed the typical (or at least common) spelling. I would want to check other, older texts. But due to normalized spelling, this is impossible.
Now, I do understand the uses of normalized spellings. Not everyone is coming at these texts as linguists/philologists, and having all of these texts rendered in a general standardized way for everything is of tremendous use for accessibility to a very broad audience...
But it is important to realize what we are losing in the process. Much of the myths about a standard, unchanging standard Classical language from the beginning of Islam until today stem from the destructive way in which any feature of interest is stamped out of editions.
Besides writing the history of Islam, which one does by making these manuscripts accessible, we must also write a history of the primary language of Islam. At the moment that is very essentially impossible. It's in fact easier to do for Christian Arabic and documentary papyri...
wheere the philological editing practices are more aligned to conducting this kind of research. But due to the mismatch in practice between these two groups is only seldom appreciated, as a result the differences is presented to be much bigger than it actually is.
I don't know what the answer is, but I'll finish with a final thought. Quranic orthography is *very* different from normative Classical Arabic orthography, and obviously something of a transition happened between the earliest period and the Classical tradition.
This transition is totally erased in the Classical manuscript editions due to normalization. But if one looks at Or. 298 (252 AH), you can still see a transitional stage, e.g. tarā-hā spelled تريها not تراها.

…italcollections.universiteitleiden.nl/view/item/2000…

Do we really wanna lose these insights?

FIN

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More from @PhDniX

7 May
ifiɣr pl. ifaɣriwn is one of those words that has unexpected i~a alternation in the stem between the singular and the plural. Compare also igidr pl. igadrn 'eagle', iɣirdm pl. iɣardmiwn. Such alternations also show up in Tuareg tenere pl. tinariwen 'desert'
Kb. izimr pl. izamarən 'lamb'
Tuareg teɣse taɣsiwen 'ewe'
Tuareg eskăr pl. askarăn 'nail'

Whenever such alternations show up, Tuareg consistently gives a reflex with /e/ in the singular and /a/ in the plural. /a/ and /e/ seem to be phonetically conditioned variants elsewhere.
Because there is otherwise no reason to assume historical apophony here, I argue that here too the /e/, that becomes /i/ in most northern varieties must originally come from an *a, that shifts to /e/ in the singular, while this is blocked in the plural.
Read 7 tweets
3 May
While there are hundreds of differences between modern print editions of the Quran and ancient manuscripts, this is not the case if you compare ancient manuscripts. They agree with each other in many non-trivial ways. I've done a quick a critical edition of Sūrat al-Raḥmān.
First image is some explanation on my sources and decisions that I have taken. Second image is the critical edition, which required only 12 notes in the critical apparatus. Many these deviations are typical only of later manuscripts. In the early centuries the text is very stable
At some point, some of the rasm is innovated, and in the eastern Islamic world the Uthmanic rasm is dropped altogether in favour of Classical Spelling. But before that the text transmission is remarkably stable.

This was done quickly maybe there's still some mistakes.
Read 4 tweets
29 Apr
In the Quran, God is referred to in three places (Q2:255; Q3:2; Q20:111) as al-ḥayy al-qayyūm "The Living, The All-Sustaining". ʿUmar ibn al-Ḫaṭṭāb , the second Islamic caliph, is attributed as reading al-Ḥayy al-Qayyām, a reading which has an interesting biblical parallel.
This reading shows up in the non-canonical reading collections like Ibn Ḫālawayh, but also in Kufic manuscripts, see previous tweet where a vocalizer has added a yellow ʾalif to indicate al-ḥayy al-qayyām.
The specific al-ḥayy al-qayyām bring to mind a verse from Aramaic part of the Hebrew bible, Daniel 6:27 (thanks for alerting me of it@bnuyaminim!) it reads: הוּא אֱלָהָא חַיָּא וְקַיָּם לְעָלְמִין: hu ʾɛ̆lāhā ḥayyā wqayyām lʿålmīn "he is God, living and steadfast forever".
Read 9 tweets
20 Apr
In recent months I've been looking at a specific group of Quranic manuscripts written in the very common B.II style. Today I decided to look at the size of the folios and their height and width. The outcome surprised me but is really cool, so here's a thread! 🧵 Image
While the corpus of 22 manuscripts I'm looking at is all written in the same style, usually have 16 lines to the page, the actual sizes of the parchment folios differ radically from manuscript to manuscript. The smallest, Arabe 399 is 42 by 73 mm (!), the largest 310 by 410 mm.
The most typical size is around 150 x 205 mm, but what is the relationship between these vastly differing sizes? Is there any rhyme or reason?

I decided to plot the sizes out as a scatterplot , and the result was striking. They form an almost perfectly straight line! Image
Read 13 tweets
15 Apr
äyaʔḫtʸ comes from *al-ʕaql

Let's go through the sound changes together and see if we can make sense of it!
*l regularly shifts to intervocalically/word-finally

äyiʔm 'camel', cf. Kabyle alɣʷəm
iyəm 'skin', cf. Tashlhiyt ilm
aʔgäy 'earth' cf. akal
In consonant clusters, *l bcomes:
1. tʸ before and after voiceless consonants
- ämäddäwktʸ 'friend', cf. Pan-Berber aməddakʷl
- ätʸkəm 'to arrive', cf. Tashlhiyt lkm
2. lt > ll
- tämäddäwkəL 'female friend', cf. taməddakʷlt
3. l > y
ogyi 'pass the afternoon', cf. kəl
Read 9 tweets
26 Mar
ʾAbū Muḥammad Yaḥyā b. al-Mubārak al-Yazīdī (d. 202 AH) was a Basran reader and grammarian, who is most well-known as being the most prominent transmitter of the canonical Basran reader ʾAbū ʿAmr. He also composed his own personal reading which differed minimally from ʾAbu ʿAmr
Al-Ḏahabī relates an elegant 5 verse didactic poem composed by ʾAbū ʿAbd aḷḷāh al-Mawṣūlī Šuʿlah, which lists the places where al-Yazīdī differs from ʾAbū ʿAmr (and thus also differs from how he taught ʾAbū ʿAmr's reading to al-Dūrī and al-Sūsī). Let's look at the poem!
Metre: Ṭawīl.
ʾalā ḫuḏ limā ḫtāra l-yazīdī li-nafsihī
"Truly, take what al-Yazīdī chose for himself"
(Note al-Yazīdī instead of al-Yazidiyyu to fit the metre).

ḫālafa fīhi l-māziniyya muḥarrarā
"he disagreed with ʾAbū ʿAmr (al-Māzinī) as it is recorded in writing."
Read 25 tweets

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