Diacritical Marks of the Qur'an: Difference between revisions

[[File:Sura 24 without vowels and dots.jpg|right|thumb|215px|Arabic script from a Qur'an dated 150 AH showing Sura 24:34-36 without Vowels and Dots.]]

The earliest manuscripts of the [[Qur'an]] made very limited use of [[Arabic_letters_and_diacritics#The_Arabic_Diacritics|diacritical marks]], which is true also of other early [[Arabic]] documents of the 7th century. Dots (or small dashes) to distingish homographic consonants such as ت and ب were used only sporadically at first, and markings for short vowels begin to be seen in the late 7th / early 8th century CE, when coloured dots are introduced for that purpose, indicating a wide variety of reading traditions. There was also a lack of word-internal alifs in such manuscripts. Hamza and tanwin are not marked in early manuscripts either, though academic research has demonstrated that these were not spoken in the [[Internal Rhymes as Evidence for Old Hijazi|Old Hijazi]] dialect in which the Quran was originally uttered, and there was a reduced grammatical case ending system which was later classicized.

{{Quote|1=Marijn van Putten (2022) ''Quranic Arabic: From its Hijazi origins to its classical reading traditions'', p. 154 (downloadable free in pdf format)<ref name="vanPutten2022" />|2=Pragmatic considerations and extra-linguistic hints would have resolved to a large extent the resulting ambiguities. Nevertheless, "to the Quranic reciters, placement of ʔiʕrāb and tanwīn was a highly theoretical undertaking, not one that unambiguously stemmed from its prototypical recitation and composition."<ref>Ibid. pp. 153-154.</ref> }}

{{Quote|1=Marijn van Putten (2022) ''Quranic Arabic: From its Hijazi origins to its classical reading traditions'', pp. 53-4 (downloadable free in pdf format)<ref name="vanPutten2022" />|2=Occasionally it is possible to envision those variant readings indeed have origins in a pre-existent oral tradition where the rasm, by accident, accommodated both readings. For example, in Q33:68 ʕāṣim is the only one to read wa-ʔalʕan-hum laʕnan kabīran “and curse them with great cursing”, rather than wa-ʔalʕan-hum laʕnan kaṯīran “and curse them with many a curse.” (Ibn al-Ǧazarī, §3952). The difference between these two readings comes down to a difference in dotting in the word كٮٮرا which could either be read kaṯīran or kabīran, but these two readings are semantically and phonetically so close, that it does not seem unlikely that such variants could have existed in the oral transmission of the Quranic text before canonization, and by sheer accident happened to agree with the rasm when it was instated. '''However, there are other variants where the phonetics are rather different, and it is by coincidence that in the ambiguous script of Arabic they happen to be written the same.''' It is unlikely that these kinds of variants do not have their basis in the Uthmanic rasm. Some salient examples of this point are the following: ڡٮٮٮٮوا fa-taṯabbatū ‘proceed with caution!’ (al-Kisāʔī; Ḥamzah; Xalaf), fa-tabayyanū ‘be clear!’ (the others) (Q4:94; Q49:6, Ibn al-Ǧazarī, §2951); ىڡصالحٯ yaquṣṣu l-ḥaqq ‘he tells the truth’ (Nafīʕ, ʔabū Ğaʕfar Ibn Kaṯīr, ʕāṣim), yaqḍi l-ḥaqq ‘he decides the truth’ (the others) (Q6:57; Ibn al-Ǧazarī, §3029);7 ٮٮلوا tatlū ‘recites, recounts’ (al- Kisāʔī; Ḥamzah; Xalaf) tablū ‘tests’ (the others) (Q10:30; ibn al-Ǧazarī, §3354). '''In such cases, the most likely explanation as to why the readers disagree is not that they were transmitting an oral transmission, but rather that the readers were confronted with an ambiguous rasm and interpreted it in two ways that both made semantic sense.'''}}

As we stated earlier, the Qur'an was written largely without diacritical marks. At the time of Muhammad, Arabic orthography was yet to develop into what we have known for centuries. There was very limited use of marks to distingish between consonants of the Arabic alphabet of similar shape (homographic) and there were no short vowel marks or word-internal alifs. While agreement on how to read most of the text is due to it being obvious and a common memory or understanding for the most part, the history of recorded variant recitations and manuscripts show that often the readers needed to interpret and choose for themselves from the many possible meanings available in the Arabic without diacritical marks.  

In order for non-Arabic speakers to understand what is being discussed here, we will look at several Arabic words and how the use of diacritical marks for consonants affect their meanings and can even change one word into another of a completely different consonantal root:

*If you put two points below the first, one below the second, and three above the third, it's "yaboth" (يبث) which translates as "he broadcasts" in English.

   

*The word "bent" (بنت) will become "banat" (بنَت) by putting "Fathha" (َ ) on the second letter, which means "she built" in English.

*The word "nabat" نبت (which translates as “grew” in English, for something that was planted) will become "nabott" نبُت if we add "damma” (ُ ) to the second letter, which means "we make a decision" in English.

==Classical Muslim scholars: Diacritical marks were introduced because errors began to appear==