Old Hijazi: Difference between revisions

== Main characteristics of Old Hijazi ==

E.g.

since that the word kitāb (book) is the subject of the sentence, it takes the ‘u’ final short vowel. The two words “kitābu Muḥammad” are in construct (book of Muhammad). The possessed noun retains the final short vowel in Old Hijazi.

المدرسة جديدة (the school is new)

هذه مدرسة الحي (This is the neighborhood’s school)

اشتريت كتابا جديدا (I bought a new a book).

Classical Arabic: Kitābuhū jadīd.

Classical Arabic: ʕalayhim

== Quranic Comparison between Classical Arabic and Old Hijazi ==

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==The Quranic Consonantal Text==

The Qur’anic consonantal text (QCT) is the original consonantal skeleton of the text of the Qur’an. It is derived from the vast Uthmanic corpus of copies of the Qur’an created after the third caliph Uthman standardized the Quran and ordered the destruction of all other different versions. The QCT was written without most (but not without all) of the diacritical marks and dots which now typify Arabic texts, including hamzahs, consonant dots and short vowel marks (rarely used in modern Arabic writing but used in the Quran and Hadith to ensure proper pronunciation). Other differences between QCT and modern Arabic writing include the mid-word long ā vowel which is usually unwritten in QCT.  

The QCT shows a number of differences from both the later interpretation of it in the Islamic tradition and later medieval norms around writing Arabic.

Some Arabic words such as raʾā رأى and fatā فتى are spelled with a final “y” (ى) but pronounced as a long vowel ā. The ‘y’ that is pronounced as ā is called Alif Maqṣūrah and in modern spelling it doesn’t take the bottom two dots which are reserved for a genuine ‘y’ or ‘ī’, i.e: in modern prints of the Quran, a word-final ى is pronounced as ā, while a word-final ي  (with the two dots) is pronounced as ‘y’ or ‘ī’. The QCT analysis, particularly evidence based on rhyme, shows that the Alif Maqṣūrah in the Quran wasn’t pronounced as ā. Early Arabic texts written in Greek show that this letter was pronounced as ē. It’s also pronounced as ē in some canonical readings. When Arabic was Classicized, the ‘ē’ sound merged into ‘ā’.  

The QCT never writes out the tanwiin, the addition of a nūn to the Iʕrāb ending of a noun, with one exception, where the expression kaʾayyin min “oh how many of” is written in all its 7 attestations in the Quran as كأين من , which is an older form where the nunation got fossilized into the expression. Otherwise the 3rd person masculine accusative ‘an’ is written just as a long ‘ā’ ا or else the tanwīn is not written at all.

== Enforcement of Classical Arabic on Early Arabic Texts ==

E.g.

But if the possessive noun begins with the definite article, the final short vowel of the possessed noun is replaced with the vowel of the ‘al’ article. E.g.: αβδαλλα/abdalla / عبد الله (Classical Arabic: Abdullah).  

Example for feminine “at” in construct:

The word “father” in the nominative appears as abū while in the genitive appears as abī<ref>[https://www.academia.edu/24938389/Al_Jallad_2017_The_Arabic_of_the_Islamic_Conquests_Notes_on_Phonology_and_Morphology_based_on_the_Greek_Transcriptions_from_the_First_Islamic_Century Ahmad Al-Jallad, The Arabic of the Islamic conquests, 2017, p11]</ref>.  

Αβου Σαειδ /abū saʕīd/ أبو سعيد

'''5-  The alef maqsūrah ى is pronounced as ē instead of the Classical Arabic pronunciation ā.'''

Μαυλε /mawlē/مولى

An example of these Umayyad Greek-Arabic texts:

This inscription includes the Arabic pronunciation of the title and name of Muʕāwiyah, the first Umayyad caliph.

Another Umayyad Greek-Arabic text:

This is an Umayyad Note to the people of the city of Neṣṣana demanding that they pay their due of the Jizyah (Tax on non-Muslims). It’s written both in Arabic and Greek. The Greek portion includes the following Arabic names that lacked any case inflection:

Classical Arabic: Banī saʕdin ibni mālik

== The Damascus Psalm Fragment ==

E.g.

Ατε

E.g.<ref>Ibid, p.80</ref>

ʕabdərahṃān

'''5- The pronominal suffix of the 3^rd person masculine plural takes only the “hum” form. While classical Arabic has both “hum” and “him”.'''  

βη αυθάνϳὑμ

'''6- The indefinite accusative is marked with ā instead of classical Arabic “an”.'''  

χαϳμετ σεϳλουμ [ḫaymet seylūm] خيمة سيلوم <ref>Ibid, p.91</ref>

'''1- Frequent loss of Hamzah'''<ref>Blau and Hopkins, [https://www.academia.edu/38210910/Joshua_Blau_and_Simon_Hopkins_Judaeo-Arabic_Papyri_Collected_Edited_Translated_and_Analysed_Jerusalem_Studies_in_Arabic_and_Islam_vol._9_1987_87-160 Judaeo-Arabic Papyri], 1987, p.126</ref>''':'''

Litteral transcription: alrdyh

== Final short vowels and Nunation in the Quranic Readings Tradition ==

Final short vowels and nunation (Iʕrāb) are fully employed in all of the canonical readings. This doesn’t necessarily mean Iʕrāb was part of the original language of the Quran since that the linguistic and historical analysis reveals that these readings were linguistically reworked<ref>Marijn Van Putten, [https://www.academia.edu/71626921/Quranic_Arabic_From_its_Hijazi_Origins_to_its_Classical_Reading_Traditions_Studies_in_Semitic_Languages_and_Linguistics_106 Quranic Arabic], p.214</ref>, none of them represents natural language<ref>Ibid, p.99</ref>, they were full of innovation and didn’t strictly adhere to a supposed oral tradition that goes back to Muhammad. An example of this is the following report from Al-Kisāʾī, the founder of a one of the canonical readings. In his reading, he treats the word thamūd in the accusative as triptotic (thamūdan: i.e. it can take nunation and one of three possible final short vowels). He also treats the word in the genitive and nominative as diptotic (thamūda/thamūdu: i.e. can’t take nunation, and can take one of two possible final short vowels instead of three). Al- Kisāʾī breaks his own rule in verse Q11:68 where the word thamūd is mentioned twice: first in the accusative and second in the genitive. According to his rule, the first word in the verse should be treated as triptotic (thamūdan), and the second word as diptotic (thamūda), but instead he treats both of them as triptotic (thamūdan, thamūdin, respectively):

Unlike what the readers did with the entirety of the Quran, the mysterious letters are the only verses they didn’t force case inflection on. These letters appear at the beginning of 29 Surahs, such as Surah no.2 which begins with the three letters ألم (ALM) recited as “Alef lām mīm”. No one knows what these letters mean or why they were employed. Muslim scholars have many different explanations that are based on pure speculation.

Also when modern Muslim scholars cite this Hadith they pronounce the letters at the last part of the Hadith with inflection as can be heard in this video:

Since that these letters should be inflected in Classical Arabic, why were they left without any inflection in the readings tradition? Van Putten answers:{{Quote|[https://www.academia.edu/71626921/Quranic_Arabic_From_its_Hijazi_Origins_to_its_Classical_Reading_Traditions_Studies_in_Semitic_Languages_and_Linguistics_106 Marijn Van Putten, Quranic Arabic, p.200]|The form of the mysterious letters is fairly easy to understand from a situation that started out as lacking inflectional endings, which were classicized.

As these mysterious letters have no obvious syntactical function, it is difficult to classicize these into an inflectional paradigm. The inverse, however, is more difficult to understand. There is no reason why the mysterious letters would be uninflected, if the base language of the Quran was inflected.}}

The use of Hamzah is among the differences in linguistic characteristics between the 10 canonical readings. A lot of the readings, including the reading of Ḥafṣ, heavily use the Hamzah while other readings use it moderately. The Hamzah isn’t an original part of the Quran (except in word-final Hamzah that’s preceded by the long vowel ā). There are reports clearly showing that the Hamzah was a later addition. One of these reports says that Nāfiʕ, the founder of one of the ten canonical readings, was asked if it’s possible to introduce the Hamzah to (the two words in the Quran) “al-dhīb” and “al-bīr”. He replied: “If there are Arabs who use the Hamzah with these words then you can use the Hamzah”<ref>السبعة في القراءات لابن مجاهد، ص346، تحقيق شوقي ضيف

Ghanim Qadduuri, Rasm Al-Mishaf, p357</ref>

== The Hamzah and the Consonantal Text of the Quran ==

The consonantal text of the Quran provides evidence that the original language of the Quran lacked the Hamzah.

By dropping the Hamzah from khāṭiʾah, it becomes: khāṭiyah خاطية. It’s read as such in the reading of Abū jaʕfar.

The second evidence the QCT provides for the lack of Hamzah:

All these different forms: ء , ئ , ؤ, أ are pronounced the same: a glottal stop.

In many cases, the dropping of Hamzah leads to the creation of a long vowel, the w sound or the y sound. Prior to the standardization of Arabic orthography, the Alef used to be the symbol of the Hamzah or the long vowel ā. For example, the word for "believer" is مؤمن muʾmin. Before the first half of the first century of Islam, Arabs who had the Hamzah in their dialects wrote this word as مامن . The Alef is the sign for the Hamzah in this word. But for Arabs who didn't have the Hamzah like Quraish, they wrote the word like this: mūmin مومن . It’s written as such because the dropping of the Hamzah in this word creates the long vowel ū. That's why in the QCT the word is written as مومن  instead of مامن.

People started writing the Hamzah as one of the three letters ا ي و  following the steps of the Uthmanic script. It became forgotten that the Alef is the supposed shape of hamzah. And it became forgotten that the Uthmanic Qurans were written in the dialect of the people of Hijaz who drop the hamzah. People were careful to follow the Uthmanic Quranic text which was agreed upon by the prophet's companions. This made people stick to the shapes of words as written in Uthmanic text. The Hamzah in the Uthmanic text was written as the vowels  و ي ا . So when people copied this orthography, they added dots over these letters to indicate the hamzahs. Then the dot changed to the ء symbol after Al-Khalīl invented it.}}

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