Thread by @PhDniX

I was surprised to learn that "Quranic Arabic: From Its Hijazi Origins to its Classical Reading Traditions" has released early!

It's the end result of years of research, and I'm proud of the result.

And it's Open Access for everyone! Download it now!
brill.com/view/title/615…

In the coming weeks I'll probably do some thread summarizing the main points of the book's chapters. But for now a quick summary.

This book asks the question: what is the language of the Quran, and how do we know?

The traditional answer has always been "Classical Arabic", but in my book I show that this term is extremely poorly defined.

And even whenever people say this they almost never mean it in a way that makes sense in the time that the book was written.

I then turn to the Quranic reading traditions: what can they tell us about the language of the Quran?

As it turns out, they give many mutually incompatible linguistic options, and purely on the basis of these it is difficult to adjudicate which is more representative.

So I propose to instead focus on what we can derive from the one portion of the text that we can reliably date to the very earliest period, namely the consonantal text. Examining the linguistic features of its orthography, rhyme and structure...

we can compare this against what, for example, we find in pre-Islamic Arabic as well as what the medieval grammarians report for the different dialects. Doing so a strikingly consistent picture emerges: in virtually all its linguistic features the Quran reflects a Hijazi dialect.

This is not surprising, the Quran comes from the Hijaz. And this functions as extra evidence for that.

However what is surprising is that you would not get that result if you would go from the Quranic reading traditions, which contain many non-Hijazi features.

Thus there seems to have been a movement from the Hijazi origins of the Quranic language towards the language of the reading traditions which (artificially) incorporated all kinds of non-Hijazi features. The last chapters search for traces of this "Classicization" of the readings

That is the short summary of what the book is about. It gets into lot of nitty gritty details. But feel free to ask questions!

And of course I immediately spot a totally incoherent sentence in the final version (pg. 10; read CE for the first " early manuscripts").