What is it with Classical Arabic/Qurʾānic Arabic textbooks and teaching people incorrect Arabic...
It seems like everyone has decided collectively it's better to lie about the details than actually teach it correctly.
So then you get the joy of unlearning all you learned wrong!
Of course there's also just the downright ignorant stuff about the Arabic script.

Why on earth write on the history of the script at all, if you're not going to reality check even a single thing you're saying! ARGH!
Moreover, a book that purports to be about "Quranic Arabic" but is actually specificlaly about the Arabic of the reading of Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim is defensible, but at the very least you should *mention* that it is.
Only thing is that is is based on the "standard print". So what if someone picks up their printed Quran in Morocco? Or if they're in the Netherlands or France and are likely to pick up Warš as well? And suddenly a ton of what is in the book is wrong compared to their print.
All this being said. These are minor annoyances, but they are so pervasive that I'm not sure where one is to learn "proper" Classical/Quranic Arabic at all.

The book is otherwise quite good, has a nice structure, clearly laid out.
Ah yes, the Quranic Arabic adjective kufuwwun 'equal' known for... Sūrat al-ʾIḫlāṣ???

kufuwan is *not* the accusative of kufuwwun. It is the accusative of kufuʾun with dropped hamz. That's difficult to explain, but now students are left thinking gemination is optional.
And honestly, is kufuwwun even typically in use at all? As far as I know the typical form is kufūʾ, which *still* requires you to explain the dropping of the hamzah.

And like the form kufuww, kufūʾ is not Quranic.
No... in reality it *is* a single particle that evolved to have different uses -- just at is traditionally talked about. It's from *mah 'what?'
al-luʾluʾu اللؤلؤ, al-laʿnatu اللعنة, al-lāʿibīna اللعبين, al-laġwi اللغو, al-lamama اللمم, al-lahwi اللهو, al-lāṭīfu اللطيف, al-lahabi اللهب would like to have a word with you about that rule Dr. Jones.
A bit odd to cite al-jawārī as an example, since that form only occur in the Quran in its shortened form الجوار al-jawāri.

In general, no word at all on the shortened forms, which are rather frequent throughout the Quran. Is this a grammar of Classical or Quranic Arabic?!
Hey it's really neat that the Arabic uses the maddah sign in fī l-samāʾi, but Jones explicitly says he will not explain the maddah sign, and that he will use it only to write ʾā (which is not how it is used in the Quran). So now people are left reading it as as-samaʾāʾi...
yes ʾulū/ʾulī, which literally never occurs with final nūn+fatḥah is *definitely* the best way to show the process of dropping the nūn+fatḥah. </sarcasm>

(not also the non-quranic orthography اولو instead of Quranic اولوا).
Ah yes, bi-smi is only ever written without the ʾalif in the basmalah. That it is spelled بسم in Q11:41 just means that verse is a basmalah! (quran.com/11/41).
This is... not wrong. There are a couple of places where it is not written. But it seems like you're skipping over a rather essential point of Quranic orthography here, i.e. that the otiose ʾalif is written hundreds of times where it is NOT the 3 m.p. ending.
That is NOT the Hijazi mā. The Hijazi mā is only when the predicate is marked with the accusative. Which Jones does mention, but as a 'subset' of the Hijazi mā.

I appreciate him making a distinction between Quranic usage and classical usage here though.
with the perfect only, except of course when it is not. Like Q2:214; Q3:142; Q9:16; Q10:39; Q11:111; Q38:8; Q49:14; Q62:3; Q80:23
No doubt word-order is sometimes changed to accommodate the rhyme. But I'm not sure if this is a good example, nor that ʾantum muʾminūna bihī is the most natural way of saying it. The only phrase I could find with that 'natural' word-order in the Quran is ʾantum muġnūna ʿannā
Happy to see Jones discuss these forms. But where on earth does the declaration that they are Hijazi forms come from? Purely because it is Quran and therefore it must be Hijazi?

The grammarians certainly don't identify it this way. What's the point of introducing it like that?
Prepositional phrases may also be inserted in between if the subject of ʾanna is definite, or in construct. And as far as I can tell that's in fact more common than with the indefinite form.
Correct observation that the uncontracted form is more typical in the Quran. However the constracted form of yartadid occurs, and it is *not* vocalised yartaddi! It's yartadda (Q27:40). You only get i before hamzat al-waṣl: Q59:4 yušāqqi llāha

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More from @PhDniX

26 Jul
Al-Farrāʾ's maʿānī al-qurʾān is an important early source of a somewhat systematic description of the Kufan readings. Usually what he reports agrees with what we find in the canon. But sometimes he deviates from it, like this discussion for Q29:66. He tells us: Image
"ʿĀṣim and al-ʾAʿmaš recited wa-l-yatamattaʿū, taking it as a command or rebuke, with no vowel on the Lām, and the people of the Ḥijāz read wa-li-yatamattaʿū with a kasrah (on the lām) taking it to mean kay 'in order to'"

But that's not how ʿĀṣim is said to read!
Indeed at least for the Medinan Nāfiʿ, disagreement is reported for reading wa-li-yatamattaʿū. In canonical transmissions both the Medinans Waṛš from Nāfiʿ and ʾAbū Jaʿfar indeed read wa-li-yatamattaʿū as al-Farrāʾ reports (but Ibn Kaṯīr, the other Hijazi does not). ImageImage
Read 7 tweets
19 Jul
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:
Read 15 tweets
16 Jun
"Is the Quran (perfectly) preserved?" is a question I get a lot. I'm never sure how to answer this, or why I am considered the person to ask. This is obviously a question of faith, not something that can be known as an absolute truth. Against better judgment, a small thread. Image
You might be surprised to learn that the preservation of the Quran is not something that comes up in my work. Nor is it a theme at conferences about the Quran. When talking about the history of the Quran, "preservation" is simply completely irrelevant.
There are all kinds of things you can say about the transmissions and history of the Quranic text, and even sometimes with high probability. But it is not possible to have certainty that how the Quran we have today is syllable-by-syllable exactly how the prophet said it once.
Read 18 tweets
12 Jun
An interesting set of questions which seemed big enough to make a little thread out of it. What can manuscripts tell us in terms of text criticism of the Quran? What can it tell us about the history of the reading traditions? Is it comparable to the bible?
First things first: all manuscripts that we have today (except one), all are from a single text type, the Uthmanic text type. This is a highly standardized text which shows very little variation across different manuscripts in its basis consonantal text.
There was a period of significantly more variation. The lower text of the Sanaa Palimpsest is a testament to that. Also the reports of companion codices like that of Ibn Masʿūd and ʾUbayy seem genuine, and clearly show that there was some more variation before canonization.
Read 23 tweets
27 May
Months ago, I promised to do a follow-up thread on this series of comparisons between Nabataean Arabic and Old Hijazi. I said I would discuss the so-called Barth-Ginsberg alternation, this concerns the prefix vowel of verbs. Image
The medieval Arabic Grammarians tell us that the prefix vowel of verbs may be either /i/ or /a/, which is conditioned by the following vowel. If the vowel is /u, i/ the prefix vowel is /a/, and if the vowel is /a/, the prefix vowel is /i/.

- niʿlamu, nistaʿīnu
- naktubu, nafqidu
This alternation affects the prefix 1sg. ʾa/ʾi-, 1pl. na/ni- and the feminine or 2nd person ta/ti-. The masculine prefix ya- is said to be exempt from it (except for some contexts). Thus:
- ʾaktubu, taktubu, naktubu, yaktubu
- ʾiʿlamu, tiʿlamu, niʿlamu, YAʿlamu
Read 18 tweets
26 May
The past few days I've been pondering over an interesting terminological conundrum in the use of the term madd 'length'/mamdūd 'lengthened' by al-Dānī (but also ibn Mujāhid), which seem to be mismatched with what he considered to be 'lengthened' in recitation. Image
So first some basics of Quranic recitation: the long vowels ā, ī and ū (and ē, ǟ and ǖ) are obligatorily made overlong whenever:
1. followed by a hamzah (glottal stop), e.g. السمآء as-samāāʾ "the sky"
2. in a closed syllable, e.g.: دآبّة dāābbah "animal"

This is called madd.
When there is disagreement among readers on such al-Dānī describes the long vowel that precedes the hamzah or consonant as "madd", rather than as ʾalif.
Ḥamzah and al-Kisāʾī: جعله دكا here with madd and hamz without tanwīn (dakkāʾa) and the rest: with tanwīn and no hamz (dakkan) Image
Read 25 tweets

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