Post

https://twitter.com/joumajnouna/status/1465342422557286400

More from @PhDniX

Marijn van Putten

@PhDniX

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)

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.

Read 15 tweets

Marijn van Putten

@PhDniX

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.
🧵

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.

Read 23 tweets

Marijn van Putten

@PhDniX

Apr 21

https://twitter.com/Quranic_Islam/status/1781866855990235365

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?

https://twitter.com/Quranic_Islam/status/1781866855990235365

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

@PhDniX

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.

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?

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!

Read 27 tweets

Marijn van Putten

@PhDniX

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! 🧵

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.

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

@PhDniX

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! 🧵

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.

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.

Read 10 tweets

Share this page!

Enter URL or ID to Unroll

Marijn van Putten

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

More from @PhDniX

Marijn van Putten

Marijn van Putten

Marijn van Putten

Marijn van Putten

Marijn van Putten

Marijn van Putten

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Send Email!