Thread by @PhDniX

In the Quranic text, the feminine ending -at is typically spelled with a hāʾ, ـه. However, on occasion it is written with ـت, tāʾ. Its distribution however is highly surprising, and gives insight into the original language of the Quran. Thread 🧵

The spelling with hāʾ is an unusual oddity of the Quranic (and later Classical) orthography, because in the vast majority of the contexts the feminine ending is pronounce as -at-a/i/u(n), that is with a /t/, so why would you not write it with a hāʾ?

The traditional explanation is that in Arabic one is to write a word as it should be written in utterance final position (also called pause/waqf). This does not really work for some other reasons I will not go into here, but let is accept this premise:

Words with the feminine ending, such as raḥmatun are pronounced raḥmah, with a hāʾ in pause, so "pausal spelling" would explain why it is spelled with hāʾ. However, hāʾ is not the only spelling; on occasion the word *is* spelled with tāʾ, e.g. رحمت الله quran.com/11/73

How to explain this? The most straightforward answer is that while the feminine ending is usually spelled morphologically, occasionally it spelled as it is pronounced in that context, i.e. with a tāʾ. So رحمت الله is spelled in accordance with the pronunciation /raḥmatu ḷḷāhi/

However, the contexts are not equal. If the feminine ending was pronounced as -at- always in all non-pausal contexts, we would predict that indefinite raḥmatu/a/in would sometimes be spelled رحمت and that the definite ar-raḥmatu/i/a would sometimes be spelled الرحمت.

In construct phrases like رحمت الله the tāʾ for the feminine ending show up quite frequently, i.e. more than 21% of the time. (218 construct feminines, 47 of which are written with tāʾ). That can be seen as the base % the scribes wrote phonetically instead of orthographically.

If the spelling with tāʾ is the Quranic scribes occasionally writing it not according to the orthography rule with hāʾ, but how it was actually pronounced 21% of the time, then we would predict that also indefinite and definite feminine nouns would be spelled about 21% with tāʾ.

The indefinite feminine noun occurs 1160 times in the Quran. So we predict that about 244 cases should be spelled with tāʾ.

The definite feminine noun occurs 643 times, so 135 expected spellings with tāʾ.

The actual statistics are given in the image of this tweet.

Wow! Those statistics are totally different from what you would predict!

These statistics are based on the Ḥafṣ reading who reads two words spelled with tāʾ as an indefinite noun.

Q35:40 bayyinatin is read bayyinātin by others
Q77:33 ǧimālatun as ǧimālātun

So assuming that the rasm originally intended the feminine plural in all cases the distribution becomes even more stark, it would *only* be construct forms that have the tāʾ spelling. It is very difficult to make sense of it, if it were pronounced as it is in Classical Arabic.

However, if we let the orthography guide us, assuming that in principle the rule was to always write hāʾ, but scribes occasionally slipped up and wrote tāʾ in places where they pronounced it tāʾ, a very familiar paradigm arises: -ah in all places, except in construct.

This just so happens to be the *exact* paradigm that we see in the modern Arabic dialects, and indeed the paradigm that is visible already in early Christian Arabic, Judeo-Arabic and indeed early Islamic Arabic (all pre-1000 CE).

The distribution strongly suggests that Quranic Arabic lacked the final short vowels and tanwīn so familiar in recitation today on the feminine ending. Instead, it had a paradigm identical to modern Arabic dialects:

indefinite: raḥmah
definite: ar-raḥmah
construct: raḥmat

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