Historical Linguist; Working on Quranic Arabic and the linguistic history of Arabic and Tamazight. Game designer @team18k
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On page 25, Nasser tries to present an evolutionary model, with natural selection, by which some transmission paths of the seven readers become 'canonical', while others don't. One of these is that one "drops out" when diverging from the standard reading of the group... 
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).
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".
Traditionally, the third caliph ʿUṯmān is believed to have standardized the text.
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. 
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.
Maḥmad would be a perfect match for the word-form found in the song of songs. But to give into that would of course be to allow for the Quran what they so readily consider acceptable for Hebrew, and are not willing to grant that. Double standards, plain and simple.
Notable first is that al-Dānī explicitly transmits each readings from two transmitters in two different modes of transmission:
It has long been recognised that the Quran as we have it today cannot be explained as a purely oral tradition. The written Uthmanic text plays a definite role in the transmission of the text as we have it today. Sidky: Can we show and date the existence of an oral layer?
I look specifically at the corpus of palaeo-arabic inscriptions of the 5-6th centuries, and compare to what extent the Islamic-era orthography has updated, or hasn't since then, with this I try to show that the Islamic orthography is a continuous development
Among the Uthmanic readings there are 7, and later three more readers that have come to be considered canonical.
From the appendices, noticed by @lameensouag ...
Apparently me and Ahmad have claim that "loss of final short vowels" is a neo-arabic feature... despite Al-Jallad arguing that Safaitic has lost all final short vowels except -a, and me arguing that Quranic Arabic lost all final short vowels except -ā < *-an? 
The sections they cover overlap. So we can simply start counting how many consonant are dotted in the one manuscript, and how many are dotted in the other.
In Classical Arabic, the active participle used as a predicate can have the semantics that are mostly indistinguishable from the imperfect verb.
The zāy was a simply single vertical stroke. Whereas the rāʾ had a shape that was (surprisingly!) identical to the the dāl/ḏāl. 
In the Aramaic script (and by extension the Nabataean Aramaic script -- the ancestor of the Arabic script) the <d> and <r> signs have always been quite similar, but were originally distinct. This is also the reason why the Hebrew script's ד <d> and ר <r> look so damn similar.
