Share this page!

Enter Twitter Thread URL to Unroll

Needs to be the full URL like: https://twitter.com/threadreaderapp/status/1644127596119195649

How to get URL link on Twitter App

  1. On the Twitter thread, click on or icon on the bottom
  2. Click again on or Share Via icon
  3. Click on Copy Link to Tweet
  4. Paste it above and click "Unroll Thread"!
  5. More info at Twitter Help
Marijn van Putten Profile picture
@PhDniX
May 5 • 4 tweets • 2 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
I receive a nice suggestion to do a series of short thread about the "Arabic letter of the Week". Let's see if I can say something interesting and unexpected about all the letters of the Arabic alphabet! Starting today with the ʾalif.

#ArabicLetterofTheWeek Image
In Pre-Islamic Arabic the letter ʾalif was used to write the hamzah, even in places where Classical Orthography would expect a different seat of the hamzah.

A name like hunayʾ would be spelled هنيا. The modern spelling is due to the loss of Hamzah in Hijazi/Quranic Arabic. Image
In Early Quranic manuscripts, an outlined ʾalif, usually filled in with a bisected two-tone colour, is used to mark every fifth verse as a 5-verse marker. Presumably it's the ʾalif of ʾāyah آية.

1. Leiden Or. 14.545a
2. BnF Arabe 330b ImageImage
I'll leave it at that as a thread for now! Thanks to @jabunna for this fun idea. :-)

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
　

Keep Current with Marijn van Putten

Marijn van Putten Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @PhDniX

Marijn van Putten Profile picture
May 6
What renders a qirāʾah (Quranic reading tradition) sound, and what renders it šāḏḏ (anomalous). The Islamic science of qirāʾāt has had a clear answer to this question for centuries, but the implications and what it actually disqualifies are frequently misunderstood. 🧵 Image
Everyone who has spent some time learning about the qirāʾāt will have learned about Ibn al-Ǧazarī's tripartite requirement of a sound qirāʾah:
1. ʿArabiyyah (agreement with Arabic grammar)
2. Rasm (agreement with one of ʿUṯmān's codices)
3. Sanad (a sound chain of transmission) Image
While this explicit formulation is fairly late (Ibn al-Ǧazarī dies 833/1429), it's clear that these three principles always played an important role in evaluating readings, already in the time of Ibn Mujāhid (who canonzied the first seven of the ten canonical readers).
Read 18 tweets
Marijn van Putten Profile picture
Apr 5
The Basran reciter Sallām (teacher of the canonical Yaʿqūb) has an interesting variant reading at Q6:142. Instead of the quran admonishing people not to follow the footsteps of Satan -- ḫuṭ(u)wāti š-šayṭāni, he instead reads ḫuṭʾāti š-šayṭāni "the mistakes/sins of Satan". Image
This reading for Sallām is mentioned in al-Ḫuzāʿī's Muntahā, and Ibn Jinnī explains it with this interpretation. This variant is also attested in Q2:168.

The variant interested me, so I had a look if it was marked at all in the Qur'anic manuscripts! ImageImage
So what are we looking for? In vocalised manuscripts the wāw has no less than 6 positions where a red dot may appear, and all of them have a slightly different meaning. Most notably there is a difference between marking (u)wā (right above) and (u)ʾā (to the left and above). Image
Read 5 tweets
Marijn van Putten Profile picture
Mar 9
An interesting discussion about the šaddah sign in Tašlḥiyt Berber manuscripts is a good reminder just how understudied Arabic writing and ESPECIALLY Maghrebi writing is.

I've recently done a little work on these šaddah's, so let's do a little thread! 🧵
The idea of a semi-circular or V shaped shaddah goes really far back. It's already in use in the Palermo Quran (372 AH/982-3CE), but here already in use side-by-side with the "regular" w-shaped shaddah.

It uses an orientation system of the semi-circle... Image
This system was highlighted by Muehlhaeusler in 2015 who got it from al-Dānī's work on vocalisation (d. 444).

The nice thing about the system is it functions as both a shaddah+vowel:

downward above: shaddah+fathah
upward above: shaddah+ḍammah
upward below: shaddah+kasrah ImageImage
Read 9 tweets
Marijn van Putten Profile picture
Mar 9
Feminine ending with "the usual triptotic case endings" , he says!
I've argued a couple of years ago that the feminine ending originally was in fact diptotic in proto-Semitic.
The evidence is almost entirely based on Arabic, but if you accept the argument I think it follows. 🧵
My original paper set out to answer the question: why is it that Classical Arabic /-at-an/ does not become /-atā/, just like non-feminine /-an/ does.
But instead you get the asymmetrical:
rajulā# but 'imra'ah#
I noticed that a similar asymmetry occurred in certain Yemeni dialects
In Tihama Yemeni dialects, words have a reflex tanwin either as word-final -u or -in when they are in the indefinite form.
These would NOT appear in words that are historically diptotes.
so: hāyx̂-in "going" (triptotic)
astnaǧ "deaf (m)." (diptotic)
stanǧāy "deaf (f.)" (diptotic)
Read 10 tweets
Marijn van Putten Profile picture
Feb 23
Leemhuis in his 1977 PhD thesis, later to be published as a book, conducted a study on the semantic distinction between the faʿʿala (D stem) and ʾafʿala (C stem) stems in Quranic Arabic. He takes the distinction between nazzala and ʾanzala 'to send down' as a case study. 🧵
He observes that for the morphological stem distinctions, the Sibawayh mentions that the distinction between the D and C (which Leemhuis calls H) stem can be related to the plurality of the object.
ʾaġlaqtu l-bāba "I closed the door"
ġallaqtu l-ʾabwāba "I closed the doors"
A bit later on that same page, Sibawayh informs us that ʾAbū ʿAmr used to make a distinction between nazzala and ʾanzala -- considering the placement it seems to imply: distinguished this type of distinction dependent on the plurality of the object.
Read 25 tweets
Marijn van Putten Profile picture
Feb 22
@IslamicOrigins @TheMuslimTheist @OneofYoda Let me chime in on literacy real quick: it's difficult to judge literacy on the basis of inscriptions, of course. But it's automatically shockingly high to the modern conceptualizations of traditions (and Shoemaker) which present the Hijaz as an isolated literary black hole.
@IslamicOrigins @TheMuslimTheist @OneofYoda I find that if you take the tradition at its word, it is striking that a high number of central companions seem to have been literate.
Ibn Masʿūd, ʾUbayy, ʿUmar, ʿUṯmān, and even women like ʿĀʾišah are all presented as unremarkably literate.
@IslamicOrigins @TheMuslimTheist @OneofYoda On top of that, the Hijazi orthography that we see in the Quran is clearly not an example of "incidental writing". You have a spectrum of spelling, form "naive" -- one someone writes when they have just learned the letters -- to one with a "deep orthography".
Read 7 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

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

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

Send Email!

:(