Quranic ArabicPub Date : 2022-02-10DOI: 10.1163/9789004506251_005
al-farrā, Kitāb, fīh Luġāt al-Qurʔān
{"title":"The Quranic Consonantal Text: Morphology","authors":"al-farrā, Kitāb, fīh Luġāt al-Qurʔān","doi":"10.1163/9789004506251_005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004506251_005","url":null,"abstract":"In the previous section we have shown that when looking to answer the question what the language of the Quran is, the reading traditions fail to give a consistent answer. They are linguistically diverse, none of them look like natural language, and they must be considered to be a concerted effort to beautify the recitation of the Quran through the use of exotic linguistic features from a variety of different dialects, augmented with completely innovative forms that do not seem to have been part of anyone’s natural speech. These reading traditions take shape with the eponymous readers, and it is difficult to see further back than these readers through internal reflection. However, there is a source of the Quran that carries linguistic information that does go back to the very first decades of Islam: the written text itself. In recent years it has become clear that virtually every early Quranic manuscript that we have access to today goes back to a single archetypal copy (Cook 2004; Sinai 2014a; 2014b; van Putten 2019c). The dating of these manuscripts is so early that a date much later than the date attributed to it by the Islamic tradition (that is, during the reign of ʕuṯmān b. ʕaffān, 644–656ce) is quite difficult to envision. This primary source, while written in a highly defective script still carries a lot of linguistic information thatwe can likewise date back to this early period: the spelling is not random, but forms a clear system. This orthography must be seen as an important source of linguistic data, and its frequent deviations from the later standard Classical Arabic orthography can give us important insights into the nature of the language and how it differs from Classical Arabic. Moreover, as the Quran is a rhymed text, we receive a unique insight into some phonological features of the language which are not easily recoverable from other texts from this period, such as the early Islamic papyri.","PeriodicalId":299202,"journal":{"name":"Quranic Arabic","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131674882","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Quranic ArabicPub Date : 2022-02-10DOI: 10.1163/9789004506251_010
{"title":"Notes on Orthography, Phonology and Morphology of the Quranic Consonantal Text","authors":"","doi":"10.1163/9789004506251_010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004506251_010","url":null,"abstract":"This appendix serves as amore detailed discussion for some of the topics of the language of the Quranic Consonantal Text that have come up throughout this book. As previous works on the language and orthography of the Quran have mostly relied on the Cairo Edition, which is not always an accurate reflection of the Uthmanic Text, this appendix aims to add some more detailed discussion to questions of orthography, phonology and morphology of Quranic Arabic. Throughout the book there are several references to this appendix, but I have also included topics of note here which do not receive direct discussion in the book. It is hoped that this appendix can function as a short but useful guide to some of the main features of Quranic Arabic on its own. In some cases, discussions here rely on observations and generalizations of the orthography found in early Quranicmanuscripts.Whenever I do so, I refer to Appendix B, which is a list of relevant tables that compares the orthography of certain words across early Quranic manuscripts.","PeriodicalId":299202,"journal":{"name":"Quranic Arabic","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133954646","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Quranic ArabicPub Date : 2022-02-10DOI: 10.1163/9789004506251_009
abū ḥayyān, Baḥr al-Muḥīṭ
{"title":"From Hijazi beginnings to Classical Arabic","authors":"abū ḥayyān, Baḥr al-Muḥīṭ","doi":"10.1163/9789004506251_009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004506251_009","url":null,"abstract":"The previous chapters have been concerned with four general topics. The first of these asked the question what the ʕarabiyyah was according to the earliest grammarians—demonstrating that these early grammarians had a much less prescriptive view of the language than what we later come to define as Classical Arabic. This is cause for us to rethink what it means for the language of the Quran to be the ʕarabiyyah, and forces us to ask a more precise question: what was the language of the Quran really like, which of themyriad competing features of the ʕarabiyyah were the ones that were proper to the language of the Quran, if any? Turning to the Quranic reading traditions, we find that far from giving a uniform answer as to the linguistic features of Quranic Arabic are, they frequently employ many different forms reported by the grammarians. This shows that in this period the concept of what the ʕarabiyyah was and was not, was still verymuch under debate.Moreover, it was shown that the linguistic system that the Quranic reading traditions reflect do not seem to form consistent linguistic systems that agree very well with the Arabic dialects as described by the grammarians. Moreover, they frequently go beyond what falls under the purview of the grammarians, incorporating linguistic features that must be thought of as artificial. Because of the great amount of disagreement between the readings, as well as their artificial nature, the Quranic readings cannot be seen as giving a clear and undeniable insight into what the language of the Quran truly was at the time of its composition. Subsequently, I proposed that we do away with the mixed signals that come in through the Quranic reading traditions, and instead focus on the linguistic features that can be deduced from the one part of the Quranic corpus that clearly stems from the early Islamic period, namely the Quranic Consonantal text of the Uthmanic Archetype. Once we look at the features that can be","PeriodicalId":299202,"journal":{"name":"Quranic Arabic","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126047673","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Quranic ArabicPub Date : 2022-02-10DOI: 10.1163/9789004506251_007
{"title":"Classicized Hijazi: imposition of the hamzah","authors":"","doi":"10.1163/9789004506251_007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004506251_007","url":null,"abstract":"In 2020, Ahmad Al-Jallad put forward the bold hypothesis that Classical Arabic as we know it today is not a single linguistic system but rather the outcome of a complex interaction between Old Hijazi, i.e. the language of the Quran and early Islamic Arabic on the one hand and the poetic register of the Qaṣīdahs of the Maʕaddites on the other (Al-Jallad 2020b, 69ff.). This suggestion is very much in line with what we have argued for so far in the previous chapters and previous studies (van Putten 2017a; 2017c; 2018; 2019b; van Putten and Stokes 2018). While Quran today is read with a certain amount of linguistic variation, these reading traditions, despite their variation still agree on several central features such as the retention of the *ʔ (in most environments), and a full case inflectionwith final short vowels and tanwīnbothof which appear tohavebeen absent in the original form of Quranic Arabic as reflected by the qct. To get from the language of the qct to the language(s) used in recitation, this language has to have been ‘classicized’ over time. This claim will, of course, bring to mind the work of Karl Vollers (1906), who famously claimed that the Quran was composed in the Hijazi vernacular and only later reworked by the Arab grammarians towards Classical Arabic. His hypothesis was criticized by many, and few authors have taken his book particularly seriously but even fewer have seriously answered his arguments in a coherent way. Vollers (1906, §39–43) considered the original Hijazi vernacular—and by extension the language of the Quran—to have lacked all forms of case inflection.This is not in keepingwith theprimary sourcematerial. First of all, theqct very likely reached closure during the reign of ʕuṯmān, around 650ce (Sidky","PeriodicalId":299202,"journal":{"name":"Quranic Arabic","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121221836","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Quranic ArabicPub Date : 2022-02-10DOI: 10.1163/9789004506251_006
{"title":"The Quranic Consonantal Text: Phonology","authors":"","doi":"10.1163/9789004506251_006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004506251_006","url":null,"abstract":"It has long been recognized that the orthography of the qct, in principle reflects the phonology of Hijazi Arabic. Most notably the way that the hamzah is (not) spelled, seems to reflect the purported loss of this sound in the Hijazi dialect. While some authors see this tendency of the orthography as a purely orthographic convention, envisioning that the actual language of the Quran was pronounced with the non-Hijazi pronunciation with hamzah (e.g. Zwettler 1978, 124; Versteegh 2014, 64) others do not express a clear opinion to what extent the Hijazi orthography can reveal anything about the language of the Quran itself (e.g. Diem 1976; 1979). However, Rabin (1951, 3 f.) (also Nöldeke 1904, 11; and Blau 1977, 15 f.) is quite confident that the orthography in fact reveals something about the way the Quran was actually pronounced, saying “the pronunciation of the literary language was of course largely accommodated to their native dialect, to which the Koran spelling is therefore a fairly reliable guide.” On other occasions, Rabin likewise expresses that the orthography is to be taken seriously for the phonetics of Quranic Arabic. I agree with this view, and I believe that the correctness of this assumption is confirmed to a large extent by the Quranic rhyme (see van Putten 2018). Indeed, whenever the rhyme allows us to examine the presence of the hamzah, for example, wemust conclude that it was in fact not there whenever the orthography suggests its absence. Thus ش ا ن (Q55:29) breaks the strict |-ān| rhyme of Sūrat al-Raḥmān if read as šaʔn, whereas this problem is resolved if read as /šān/, the same is clear for ش ي ا (Q19:9) which breaks the rhymewhen read as šayʔā but is perfectly consistentwith the |-i/ayyā| rhyme if read as /šayyā/ or /šiyyā/. Theqct thus clearly reveals ahamzah-less pronunciation.Tounderstand the linguistic nature of the","PeriodicalId":299202,"journal":{"name":"Quranic Arabic","volume":"81 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127130455","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Quranic ArabicPub Date : 2022-02-10DOI: 10.1163/9789004506251_004
{"title":"Classical Arabic and the reading traditions","authors":"","doi":"10.1163/9789004506251_004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004506251_004","url":null,"abstract":"It is often stated that the Quran was composed in Classical Arabic, and that, moreover, the Quran served as a basis for Classical Arabic. These statements, taken at face value, seem to neatly wrap up our history of Arabic from the Islamic period onwards. The Quran introduced Classical Arabic as the main cultural language, and from that point forward all Islamic writing proceeded to imitate the linguistic standard set by the Quran. However, these claims have never been demonstrated, and I hope to show here that this definition is unsatisfactory. Already in the previous chapter we saw that the ʕarabiyyah in the definition of the early grammarians is very broad, allowing for many different answers to what the language of the Quran really was. It is only in later times that what is considered Classical Arabic becomes strongly restricted. In this chapter, I will show that what was accepted as proper Arabic to recite the Quran in far exceeded the strict norms of the literary language that came to be accepted. When we ask ourselves what the language of the Quran is, we should in turn ask ourselves “which Quran?” All too often, authors (often implicitly) assume that theQuranic text, in its full and ubiquitous form aswe know it from the Cairo Edition of 1924, is the language in which it was pronounced by the prophetMuhammad. This text only represents the transmission of ʔabū ʕumar Ḥafṣ b. Sulayman b. al-Muġīrah al-ʔasadī al-Bazzāz al-Kūfī (d. 180ah/796ce), colloquially known as Ḥafṣ, one of the transmitters of ʔabū Bakr ʕāṣim b. ʔabī al-Naǧūd al-ʔasadī (d. 127ah/745ce),1 colloquially known as ʕāṣim. Ḥafṣ’ trans-","PeriodicalId":299202,"journal":{"name":"Quranic Arabic","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134239925","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Quranic ArabicPub Date : 2022-02-10DOI: 10.1163/9789004506251_008
ibn masʕūd
{"title":"Classicized Hijazi: final short vowels and tanwīn","authors":"ibn masʕūd","doi":"10.1163/9789004506251_008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004506251_008","url":null,"abstract":"One of the quintessential features of Classical Arabic, but one that is strikingly elusive in both the epigraphic pre-Islamic record and the orthography of early Islamic Arabic is the presence of ʔiʕrāb and tanwīn. Much has been said about the question whether this system was part of the spoken language, or purely part of a poetic oral tradition. Some authors argued that this case system must have been part of the general spoken register (e.g. Blau 1977) while others felt that it must have been purely part of the poetic performance (e.g. Zwettler 1978). These arguments have now for a large part been superseded by material evidence not available at the time. The view that everyone who spoke Arabic in the pre-Islamic period must have had the full inflectional system of ʔiʕrāb and tanwīn can be discarded with certainty, as we now have thousands of inscriptions and papyri that prove the contrary (Al-Jallad and al-Manaser 2015; Al-Jallad 2015; 2017a; 2018a). This should change our perspective of what we should expect the inflectional system of the Quran to look like: if multiple varieties of Old Arabic from Syria and Jordan lacked the full inflectional system of Classical Arabic, how can we be certain that this is not also the case for the language of the Quran? Blau appears to have not found such argumentation compelling because he considered Arabic in Syria and Jordan to be peripheral and, explicitly discussing the case system of Nabataean and what the implications may be for the language situationof theHijaz, he concludes that “nothingmust be inferred fromborder dialects for central dialects” (Blau 1977, 9).While certainlywemust agree that one cannot conclude that just because the Proto-Arabic case system seems to have started to deteriorate in Nabataean Arabic, this must have necessarily been true for Hijazi Arabic as well, I see no reason to dismiss this possibility either, just because these varieties are “peripheral”. In fact, it has long been recognized in dialectology that it is rather the peripheral dialects,","PeriodicalId":299202,"journal":{"name":"Quranic Arabic","volume":"72 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123567152","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Quranic ArabicPub Date : 2022-02-10DOI: 10.1163/9789004506251_003
sībawayh, al-Kitāb
{"title":"What is the ʕarabiyyah?","authors":"sībawayh, al-Kitāb","doi":"10.1163/9789004506251_003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004506251_003","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":299202,"journal":{"name":"Quranic Arabic","volume":"97 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124508981","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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