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Marijn van Putten Profile picture
@PhDniX
Aug 28, 2021 • 14 tweets • 6 min read • Read on X
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Whenever one learns Classical Arabic, they are usually told that it has 6 vowels, three short ones: /a/, /i/, /u/, and their long counterparts: /ā/, /ī/, /ū/.

But many Quranic reading traditions have more than those, a short thread on the vowel systems of the seven readers. 🧵
Every single reader may have an overlong pronunciation of every single long vowel the reader has. These overlong vowels are phonetically conditioned and therefore non-phonemic. They occur:
1. Before hamza /ʔ/: [samāāʔ] /samāʔ/
2. In super heavy syllables: [dāābbah] /dābbah/
Ibn Kaṯīr simply what we would think of as the Classical Arabic vowel system. The only difference is it has the non-phonemic overlong vowels. But I've argued in a recent paper that that is actually a feature more broadly in Classical Arabic prose.

brill.com/view/journals/…
The next simplest vowel system is found with the most popular reading today, that of Ḥafṣ (transmitted of ʿĀṣim). He has all the same vowels, but has a single lexical case of ʾimālah /ē/, exclusively in the word maǧrēhā (quran.com/11/41).
Ḥamzah has many cases of /ē/. He also has a vowel /ǣ/:
1. /rāri/ > [rǣri] (allophonic)
2. /ē/ stands before the feminine ending: التورية [at-tawrǣh] (maybe allophonic?)
3. Some lexical exceptions: al-qahhǣri and al-bawǣri (phonemic, cf. an-nāhāri, al-ǧawāri)
Al-Kisāʾī has /ē/ in many places. He also has /ȳ/, e.g qȳla "it was said" (and in lost transmissions /y/, /byjūt/ "houses").
He has a phonetically conditioned allomorph of the feminine ending /eh#/, but in same environments other /ah/ doesn't become /-eh/, so it's phonemic.
Warš, transmitter of Nāfiʿ has extensive use of /ǣ/. He has /ē/ only in the Sūrah starting letters ṭā-hē (quran.com/20/). I suppose it depends on your theoretical framework whether that is phonemic. Warš also has a (limited) used of the phoneme /ȳ/.
Hišām and Ibn Ḏakwān, transmitters of Ibn ʿĀmir have the same vowel system, e.g. Hišām has /ē/ in lexically determined positions (e.g. ʿēbidūna in quran.com/109/ and ONLY in that Sūrah, same word elsewhere has /ā/). Ibn Ḏakwān, e.g. in ʿimrēn. Both have /ȳ/.
Šuʿbah, the other transmitter of ʿĀṣim, has a couple of lexically determined cases of /ē/, but different words than Ḥafṣ. He has a couple of cases lexical ultrashort vowels: /ladŭnī/ (Q18:2), /niʕĭmmā/ (Q2:271), but he has no /ă/.
Qālūn, the other transmitter of Nāfiʿ, has all three ultrashort vowel values, adding, /taʕăddū/ and /yaxăssimūna/ and /yahăddī/. Like Warš, he has limited use of /ȳ/, but unlike Warš has no /ē/ or /ǣ/ at all.
ʾAbū ʿAmr's transmitters differ somewhat on the use of ultrashort vowels, al-Dūrī using them more consistently. ʾAbū ʿAmr has /ǣ/ that occurs only in words of certain shapes and lexical positions. It has a raised allophone [ē] after /r/, but /ē/ shows up in lexical places too.
So the readers general do not have the boring Classical 6-vowel system, (only 1 with that system). All others range between 7 and 11 phonemic vowels!

Arab grammarians describe 1 more vowel: /ō/. This appears to have once been in use, but none of the canonical readers retain it.
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Addendum: I should have mentioned explicitly that I based this description on the Taysīr, but even with that it looks like I missed a vowel for Qālūn's system. He uses /ē/ only once, in /hērin/ (Q9:109).

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More from @PhDniX

Marijn van Putten Profile picture
Jul 10
Ibn Ḫālawayh's (d. 380) Kitāb al-Badīʿ is an interesting book on the Qirāʾāt because it's the earliest surviving work that tries to simplify the transmissions of the readings, and does it rather differently from what becomes popular, the system of Ibn Ġalbūn the father (d. 389) Image
Ibn Ḫālawayh was Ibn Muǧāhid's student, who is widely held to be the canonizer of the seven reading traditions. Ibn Muǧāhid's book is the earliest book on the 7 reading traditions. But canon or not, Ibn Ḫālawayh's book actually describes 8 (adding Yaʿqūb).
Today the simplified system (and the only surviving one) is the "two-rawi canon". Each of the 7 readers, have two standard transmitters (all of them were once transmitter by more transmitters than those two). This system was introduced by ʾAbū al-Ṭayyib Ibn Ġalbūn in his ʾiršād. Image
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Marijn van Putten Profile picture
May 3
NEW PUBLICATION: "Pronominal variation in Arabic among grammarians, Qurʾānic readings traditions and manuscripts".

This article has been in publication hell for 4 years. But it was an seminal work for my current research project, and a great collaboration with Hythem Sidky.
🧵 Image
In this paper we try to describe the pronominal system used in early Islamic Classical Arabic. There is a striking amount of variation in this period, most of which does not survive into "standard classical Arabic".
We first look at the grammarians and how they describe the pronominal system.. Much of this description is already in my book (Van Putten 2022), but I assure you we wrote this way before I wrote that 🥲
Notable here is that Sībawayh prescribes minhū instead of now standard minhu. Image
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Marijn van Putten Profile picture
Apr 21
In my book "Quranic Arabic" I argue that if you look closely at the Quranic rasm you can deduce that the text has been composed in Hijazi Arabic (and later classicized into more mixed forms in the reading traditions). Can we identify dialects in poetry?
I think this is possible to some extent, yes. And so far this has really not been done at all. Most of the time people assume complete linguistic uniformity in the poetry, and don't really explore it further.
But there are a number of rather complex issues to contend with:
As @Quranic_Islam already identified, there are some philological problems that get in the way in poetry that aren't there for the Quran: I would not trust a hamzah being written in a written down poem. This might be classicization. So it's hard to test for this Hijazi isogloss.
Read 13 tweets
Marijn van Putten Profile picture
Apr 17
Last year I was asked to give a talk at the NISIS Autumn School about the textual history of the Quran. Here's a thread summarizing the points of that presentation. Specifically the presentation addresses some of Shoemaker's new objections on the Uthmanic canonization. Image
Traditionally, the third caliph ʿUṯmān is believed to have standardized the text.

However, in critical scholarship of the '70s the historicity of this view came to be questioned.

How can we really be sure that what the tradition tells us is correct?
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This skepticism wasn't wholly unwarranted at the time. The Uthmanic canonization really had been uncritically accepted, not based on any material evidence.

But we now have access to many manuscripts, beautifully digitized, we can test the historicity of these claims! Image
Read 27 tweets
Marijn van Putten Profile picture
Apr 13
The canonical Kufan readers Ḥamzah and al-Kisāʾī read the word ʾumm "mother" or ʾummahāt "mothers" with a kasrah whenever -ī or -i precedes, e.g.:
Q43:4 fī ʾimmi l-kitābi
Q39:6/Q53:32 fī buṭūni ʾimma/ihātikum

This seems random, but there is a general pattern here! 🧵 Image
This feature was explained al-Farrāʾ in a lengthy discussion at the start of his Maʿānī. This makes sense: al-Farrāʾ was al-Kisāʾī's student who in turn was Ḥamzah's. Surprisingly in "The Iconic Sībawayh" Brustad is under the misapprehension that this is not a canonical variant.

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This is irregular, such a vowel harmony does not occur in cases with other words that starts with ʾu-. For example, Q13:30 is just fī ʾummatin, not **fī ʾimmatin.

However this irregular reading is part of a larger pattern of vowel harmony accross guttural consonants.
Read 15 tweets
Marijn van Putten Profile picture
Mar 20
Those who have read my book on Quranic Arabic may have noticed that I translate The Arabic word luġah as "linguistic practice", rather than "dialect" which is how many people commonly translate it.

This is for good reason: among the Arab grammarians it did not mean dialect! 🧵 Image
In Modern Standard Arabic, luġah basically just means "language", as can be seen, e.g. on the Arabic Wikipedia page on the Dutch Language which calls it al-luġah al-hūlandiyyah.

This modern use gets projected onto the early Arab grammarians like Sībawayh and al-Farrāʾ. Image
But, they clearly do not mean that to the early grammarians. This is clear from statements like Sībawayh saying: faʿil forms that have a guttural consonant as second radical have four "luġāt": faʿil, fiʿil, faʿl and fiʿl.

In English a word or word-form cannot "have" a dialect. Image
Read 10 tweets

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