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== Enforcement of Classical Arabic on Early Arabic Texts == | == Enforcement of Classical Arabic on Early Arabic Texts == | ||
{{Quote|[https://www.academia.edu/43189829/Al_Jallad_2020_The_Damascus_Psalm_Fragment_Middle_Arabic_and_the_Legacy_of_Old_%E1%B8%A4ig%C4%81z%C4%AB_w_a_contribution_by_R_Vollandt Ahmad Al-Jallad, The Damascus Psalm Fragment, p.2]|Modern scholars have generally taken for granted the antiquity and universality of the Arabic of the grammarians (Classical Arabic). Earlier written texts, such as the papyri from the seventh and early eighth centuries ce and the Quran, the earliest manuscripts of which precede the grammatical tradition by more than a century, are conventionally interpreted according to much later norms, without the need for justification. Any reader of these texts will notice that the oral component differs from the written in significant ways. To illustrate, consider the word ملىكه in Q66:6. All reading traditions instruct that this word should be pronounced as [malāʔikatun]; these traditions go back to the middle of the eighth century at the earliest, while the true seventh-century form is the written artifact, mlykh, lacking the final syllable tun. Despite the fact that the written in these cases is demonstrably older than the reading traditions, the oral is given default preference, and the differences are a reduced to orthographic convention. Indeed, most scholars have assumed that the language behind the most ancient component of the Quran, its Consonantal Text (QCT), is more or less identical to the language recited in the halls of Al-Azhar today.}} | {{Quote|[https://www.academia.edu/43189829/Al_Jallad_2020_The_Damascus_Psalm_Fragment_Middle_Arabic_and_the_Legacy_of_Old_%E1%B8%A4ig%C4%81z%C4%AB_w_a_contribution_by_R_Vollandt Ahmad Al-Jallad, The Damascus Psalm Fragment, p.2,5]|Modern scholars have generally taken for granted the antiquity and universality of the Arabic of the grammarians (Classical Arabic). Earlier written texts, such as the papyri from the seventh and early eighth centuries ce and the Quran, the earliest manuscripts of which precede the grammatical tradition by more than a century, are conventionally interpreted according to much later norms, without the need for justification. Any reader of these texts will notice that the oral component differs from the written in significant ways. To illustrate, consider the word ملىكه in Q66:6. All reading traditions instruct that this word should be pronounced as [malāʔikatun]; these traditions go back to the middle of the eighth century at the earliest, while the true seventh-century form is the written artifact, mlykh, lacking the final syllable tun. Despite the fact that the written in these cases is demonstrably older than the reading traditions, the oral is given default preference, and the differences are a reduced to orthographic convention. Indeed, most scholars have assumed that the language behind the most ancient component of the Quran, its Consonantal Text (QCT), is more or less identical to the language recited in the halls of Al-Azhar today. | ||
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The careful and dispassionate study of Arabia’s ancient epigraphy reveals a picture quite dissimilar from that presented in Muslim historical sources. The Arabic of the grammarians is not met with; instead, the peninsula displays a dazzling degree of linguistic diversity. The Old Arabic dialects differ in ways not recorded by the grammarians, while features that figure prominently in the grammatical manuals are nowhere to be found. Consider nunation (tanwīn)—this is a standard feature of Classical Arabic, but in the consonantal South Semitic writing systems, Greek transcriptions, and the Graeco-Arabic inscription A1, the feature is completely absent. While the absence of nunation in Arabic orthography is usually written off as a convention, there is no reason to assume such conventions when Arabic is written in other scripts, much less before the development of the Arabic script itself. These attestations can mean only one thing: nunation had disappeared in most forms of Old Arabic.}} | |||
== Early transcriptions of Arabic in Greek and Hebrew scripts == | |||
Since that short vowels aren’t represented in Arabic writing, early Arabic texts written in non-Arabic scripts provide important pronunciation details as these scripts are free from Arabic spelling rules and do show short vowels.{{Quote|[https://www.academia.edu/46885698/Copto_Arabica_The_Phonology_of_Early_Islamic_Arabic_Based_on_Coptic_Transcriptions Marijn Van Putten, Copto-Arabica, p.1]|One of the great challenges of understanding the linguistic history of Arabic in the early Islamic period is the highly defective spelling of early Arabic. It is ambiguous in terms of phonetic features such as the short vowels, the hamzah, and a general disagreement whether a written text is supposed to represent the vernacular or rather a form approximating Classical Arabic, or something in between, make it difficult to establish much of a baseline of expectations of the Arabic of this period. Historically, scholars interested in the history of Arabic have relied on the descriptions of the language by the Arab Grammarians who started their effort to standardize a high Arabic language around the end of the 8th century. The form of Arabic they describe, however, is highly idealized, and certainly rather artificial. Any data there is about the spoken vernacular in such works is, as Rabin (1951, p. 4) put it, seen “only through the veil of the literary Arabic used by their speakers”. Recent advances in the field of Arabic historical linguistics, spearheaded by Ahmad Al-Jallad, have made it clear that in the Pre-Islamic period, Arabic was much more diverse than was previously thought.}}{{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.44]|The lack of explicit prescriptivism in the early grammatical tradition concerning a large amount of phonological, morphological and syntactic variation should not be understood as evidence that the data presented by the grammarians is an uncurated representation of the dialects of Arabic. In fact, if we compare what the grammarians describe to contemporary Arabic texts written in scripts other than Arabic, we find one very striking difference: The Arabic of this period, not filtered through the grammarian lens, lacks the full ʔiʕrāb and tanwīn system which so quintessentially marks Classical Arabic.}} | |||
== First Islamic century Greek transcriptions == | |||
These texts are mainly official documents belonging to the Umayyad caliphate which was founded by Muʕāwiyah, a companion of Muhammad. Although the Greek texts in these documents contain short Arabic phrases (mainly names and titles), they reveal that the documented dialect has the following features: | |||
1-The loss of final short vowels and nunation.<ref>[<nowiki>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</nowiki> | |||
Ahmad Al-Jallad, The Arabic of the Islamic conquests, 2017, p11]</ref> | |||
e.g.: The name banī saʕd بني سعد is written without the final short vowel ‘i’ and without nunation (tanwīn): | |||
Β(ανι) Σααδ β(εν) Μαλεχ / B(ani) saad b(en) malek / بني سعد بن مالك | |||
Classical Arabic pronunciation: Banī saʕdin ibni mālik | |||
You can view the papyri [https://www.islamic-awareness.org/history/islam/papyri/jerus.html here]. | |||