Life and death word count in the Qur'an: Difference between revisions

The word "life" (الحياة, ''al-hayat'') is derived from the trilateral root حيي (h-y-y). In the Uthmani script, the writing style of the first Qur'anic manuscripts, it is not written like this الحياة (Simple Script), but like this ٱلْحَيَوٰةِ (Uthmani Script). This word count is complicated and it could not have been done in the English translation. This is because from the same root, there are many similar words derived and there is the verb "to give-life" which is translated into English as two words, including the word "life" itself, although in Arabic it is just one verb and the noun "life" itself is not present. When the English Qur'an says that Allah gives life to someone, then literally, he "lifes" him. It could be also translated as "resurrects". All verbs will be described as "verb" in the "Word class" column. Also there are words like "the alive" and "the living" referring to "living people" and they don't mean "life" itself (you can also notice they are written differently in Arabic). There are also 2 words translated as "life", but expressed with a slightly different word in Arabic, these words are also counted, but they are '''bold''' and can be easily excluded if we wanted not to count them.

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As we can see, besides the fact that there are only '''78 mentions''' of the word "life", there are only 114 nouns, so there is no possibility of finding 145 occurrences of the word "life", even if we counted even words like "snake" derived from the same root. If we wanted to get 145 words, we would have to mix word counts of nouns and verbs together! Also we can see that there are many words that are similar, but different, so if we want to use some special counting method, then there are probably dozens, if not hundreds of such combinations one could choose arbitrarily from.

The 78 mentions include words with prefixes and suffixes and these kind of words were often excluded in the word counts of those claiming this was a miracle for other words, for the reason of not being "basic form" enough. Using this method here, then, there are even fewer occurrences.

The word "death" (الموت, ''al-mawt'' or ''al-maout'') is derived from a trilateral root موت (m-w-t). Words derived from this root could be described similarly as the words from the root حيي (h-w-w). There is also the verb of "giving death" or "causing death" and words like "the dead" referring to dead people and not death itself. The difference here is that there are no words with a totally different meanings. All the words have something to to with death, dying or being dead. The word "kill" (''qatal'') is derived from a completely different root قتل (q-t-l). So translating the death-giving as killing might be misleading.

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Here again, if we count all occurrences of nouns derived from the root موت, we cannot get 145 occurrences, because there are only 104 nouns from this root in the Qur'an. And the word death appears '''56 times'''.

 

*There is no way to get 145 occurrences of the words "life" nor "death", because when we look at all the words derived from the same roots as the two words, we see that there are less than 145 derived nouns. So in order to get 145, nouns and verbs would have to be counted together. This still would not change the fact that the words "life" and "death" do not appear the same number of times.

**If that new method of counting is supposed to be "meaning word count", that is counting words with a similar meaning, then we would get 165 occurrences for "death" because all the words from the root موت have something to do with death or dying.

*Given the diversity of word forms for either of the two words, there perhaps exist hundreds of possible arbitrary permutations one could choose from to do the word count. If one of these combinations produces an interesting result, this is an expect outcome. This is because with a greater number of permutations to pick from, the chance that an interesting outcome becomes possible increases (and is thus a less impressive, rare, or unlikely finding)

 

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