Thread by @PhDniX

The so-called yāʾāt maḥḏūfah min al-ḫaṭṭ "the yāʾs removed from the writing". This concerns words that in Classical Arabic would typically end in a yāʾ (i.e. /ī/), but in the Quranic are written without.

Readers have different ways of dealing with this missing yāʾ 🧵

The yāʾ that gets dropped can be of all kinds of categories:
- Verbs: Q89:4 يسر for CAr. yasrī
- Nouns: Q89:9 بالواد for CAr. bi-l-wādī
- The 1sg. object pronoun: Q26:81 يحيين for CAr. yuḥyī-nī
- The 1sg. possessive pronoun: Q109:6 دين for CAr. dīn-ī

When one examines the places where such cases of /-ī/ get dropped, a fairly clear pattern emerges. In the vast majority of the cases it happens:
1. In verse final position
2. Before a pause mid-verse
3. With vocative (like يقوم "o my people")

The verse final positions typically rhyme as if indeed the /-ī/ is gone completely, e.g. Q12:45 فارسلون rhymes as /fa-ʾarsilūn/, cf. Q12:46 يعملون /yaʿmalūn/.

It therefore seems that the Quranic text reflects a dialect of Arabic that dropped /-ī/ in pausal position.

However, there are various reading traditions of the Quran, which do not necessarily share the same intuitions about this pausal dropping of /-ī/.

Moreover, in Quranic recitation almost every pause (including verse final ones!) may in theory be ignored.

As a result, reciters had to find ways to read these pausal forms even when in a non-pausal position.

Not all readers come to the same conclusion on this. The vast majority of the readers took the absence of the yāʾ seriously, and in connected speech read with a short -i.

This is what we find for the ubiquitous Ḥafṣ reading:
- Verbs: Q89:4 yasri, yasri# (# = pause)
- Nouns: Q89:9 bi-l-wādi, bi-l-wād#
- The 1sg. object pronoun: Q26:81 yuḥyī-ni, yuḥyī-n#
- The 1sg. possessive pronoun: Q109:6 dīn-i, dīn#

This is how most readers resolve it.

Yaʿqūb, however, simply ignores the text and reinstates the missing yāʾs in pause and in connected speech.
- Verbs: Q89:4 yasrī, yasrī#
- Nouns: Q89:9 bi-l-wādī, bi-l-wādī#
- The 1sg. object pronoun: Q26:81 yuḥyī-nī, yuḥyī-nī#
- The 1sg. possessive pronoun: Q109:6 dīn-ī, dīnī#

But most interesting are perhaps ʾAbū ʿAmr and ʾAbū Ǧaʿfar who (at least with the words spelled without the yāʾ) more-or-less retain the distribution that can be deduced from the consonantal skeleton: -ī in connected speech, dropped vowel in pause.

This comes into conflict with the written text because they have the option to pronounce these words that are spelled pausally without pausing. Thus for verbs: they recite: yasrī in connected speech, yasr# in pause. For nouns: bi-l-wādī, bi-l-wād#

But with the 1sg. object pronoun -nī and the possessive pronoun -ī something interesting happens.

Let us start with the object pronoun. Here both readers have two options.
1. like: Q43:61 wa-ttabiʿū-nī, wa-ttabiʿū-n#
2. Or like: Q26:108 ʾāṭīʿū-ni, ʾāṭīʿū-n#

In traditional descriptions, these two options are generally just presented in long lists at the end of chapters on Sūrah, without any clear rhyme or reason behind them, but if you look at the context in which the two options occur, a clear pattern emerges.

The -nī/-n# option occurs for words that stand in the middle of a verse (but still usually before a minor pause).

The -ni/-n# option occurs for words that stand at the end of a verse.

Linguistically, this is a rather bizarre distribution!

The non-pausal forms seem to be conditioned by the type of optional pause that follows! If a minor mid-verse pause is possible, then you use the long forms if you do not pause; if a major end of verse pause is possible, then you use the short forms when you do not pause!

So how did this come about? My hypothesis is this: I think ʾAbū ʿAmr and ʾAbū Ǧaʿfar in principle taught -nī, -n#. In their time skipping over mid-verse pauses was already common, but skipping verse final pauses was not really an option.

Thus, when these reading traditions were transmitted, only information for the mid-verse pauses were transmitted explicitly. So when new reciters in their tradition wished to not pause at the end of a verse, they had to find a way to do so, without any explicit transmission.

Thus they applied qiyās (analogy), not from a general principle that could be derived from the mid-verse pause forms, but rather from the way most other reciters were doing it. And thus the verse-final -ni was created!
The distinction thus had little to do with their own teaching

This is not complete speculation. Pausal forms are frequently a place where qirāʾāt works readily admit that they do not have a complete transmission of how to pronounce every single word if one were to pause upon it. But the tradition becomes obsessed with knowing the answer.

So that today, even that rather awkward choice of pausing on the first part of a construct phrase like رحمت الله /raḥmatu ḷḷāhi/ "the mercy of God" is explicitly described.

Al-Dānī admits to practicing qiyās in figuring out how to do this for the tradition of Ibn Kaṯīr.

If you enjoyed this thread, and would like to support me and get exclusive access to my work-in-progress critical edition of the Quran, consider becoming a patron on patreon.com/PhDniX/!

You can also always buy me a coffee as a token of appreciation.
ko-fi.com/phdnix

@threadreaderapp unroll