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Old Hijazi: Difference between revisions
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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.}} | 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.}} | ||
== Evidence based on the Consonantal Text of the Quran == | |||
{{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.99]|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. 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.}} | |||
=== '''The mismatch between Classical Arabic pronunciation and Spelling''' === | |||
(for a detailed explanation see [[Internal Rhymes as Evidence for Old Hijazi|this article]]) | |||
There exists a mismatch between Arabic spelling and classical Arabic pronunciation. For example: | |||
هناك كتاب جديد hunāka kitābun jadīd (that is a new book) | |||
The word Kitābun is spelled as if it were pronounced as kitāb. The final short ‘u’ vowel cannot be spelled as Arabic doesn’t write short vowels. But the final ‘n’ can be spelled, yet nunation is never written in Arabic. If it was, then the sentence would look like this: | |||
هناك كتابن جديد | |||
Arab grammarians tried to explain the mismatch between spelling and classical Arabic pronunciation by saying that every Arabic word is spelled in the pausal form even if the word wasn’t in a pausal position. | |||
==== '''Pausal forms''' ==== | |||
A pausal position means the word at the end of an utterance such as the last word of a sentence. When a word is in a pausal position, it receives special treatment in Classical Arabic: | |||
- Neither a final short vowel nor nunation can be attached to the word. | |||
-Due to the lack of a final short vowel, the feminine ending “ah” doesn’t change to “at”: al-madrasatu => al-madrasah. | |||
- The “an” marker for the indefinite accusative becomes a long ‘a’ vowel: Kitāban => Kitābā. | |||
- The dropping of the vowel of the third person masculine singular pronoun: Kitābuhū => Kitābuh. | |||
'''Evidence Against the Pausal Spelling Rule''' | |||
Historical linguists Van Putten and Phillip Stokes note that such a spelling convention is unique among the languages of the world p.7. They also challenge the pausal spelling convention by the following arguments based on the linguistic analysis of QCT: | |||
1- There are Internal rhymes in the Quran that only show up if every word is pronounced in the pausal form. This means that what was thought to be a special treatment for the pronunciation of pausal words was actually the norm for almost all words in the original language of the Quran. The mismatch between the Quranic spelling and the Classical Arabic pronunciation is the result of imposing classical Arabic on a text that wasn’t written in Classical Arabic. Which means the QCT was written phonetically in Old Hijazi, a language that lacked nunation and final short vowels. | |||
An example of these internal rhymes is the following attribute of Allah used as a verse ending in 15 verses such as 4:26, 8:71: | |||
عليم حكيم ʕalīmun ḥakīm (Knowing, Wise) | |||
The first word of the pair, ʕalīm, takes the final short vowel ‘u’ plus nunation. While the second word ḥakīm is in a pausal position (the end of a verse) and hence according to Classical Arabic rules the word doesn’t take the expected ‘un’ suffix. But suffix of the first word is dropped, the two words rhymes with each other: | |||
ʕalīm ḥakīm | |||
Which means that in the original language of the Quran, final short vowels and nunation weren’t only lost in pausal positions, but they were lost in all words (except in construct). | |||
There are hundreds of similar examples of Old Hijazi internal rhymes. You can see all these examples here. | |||
[[All Examples of Old Hijazi Internal Rhymes in the Quran and Hadith|https://wikiislam.net/wiki/All_Examples_of_Old_Hijazi_Internal_Rhymes_in_the_Quran_and_Hadith]] | |||
2- The treatment of the final -ī: | |||
Word-final -ī in QCT is written in some cases and omitted in others. | |||
A thorough analysis of all words with final -ī revealed that -ī is omitted mostly in pausal positions, while kept mostly in context. This important find reveals that the spelling of the Quran isn’t based on the pausal rule. Otherwise, the treatment of the final -ī wouldn’t have changed between pausal and non-pausal positions. | |||
An example of the treatment of final -ī: | |||
The possessive -ī is omitted in 143 pausal positions and never omitted in context. While it’s written in 531 context positions and 21 pausal positions. P16 | |||
3- The feminine ending ‘-ah’ is only spelled as ‘-at’ in construct. | |||
Most of Arabic singular feminine nouns and adjectives end with “-ah”. As in: madrasah مدرسة (school). But when these words are in a construct position, or when anything is attached to the end of these words such as a final short vowel, the feminine ‘-ah’ turns into ‘at’ in pronunciation but it remains spelled as ‘ah’. | |||
E.g.: | |||
al-madrasatu hunāk. المدرسة هناك (the school is there). | |||
The word madrasah is the subject of this sentence so it received a final ‘u’ vowel. And since that something was attached to the end of the word, the feminine ‘ah’ of “al-madrasah” turns into ‘at’: al-madrasatu. Yet in spelling, the word is still spelled with a final ‘h’: المدرسة . That’s because in Classical Arabic spelling, the feminine ending is always spelled as ‘h’ even in construct which is a position where the feminine ending is always pronounced as ‘t’ and never as ‘h’. The QCT adheres to this spelling rule but shows some instability in many instances where the feminine ending is spelled as ‘-t’ ـت . | |||
Van Putten and Stokes found that all instances where the feminine ending is spelled as ‘-t’ occurred in construct, a position where the feminine ending is always pronounced as ‘-t’ in all forms of Arabic including Classical Arabic and modern Arabic dialects. The incidence of the ‘-t’ spelling is 47 (22%) out of 218 total of feminine constructs present in the QCT. The rest of the feminine words in construct were spelled as ‘-h’. | |||
“The best way to understand these spellings then, is as inconsistencies of orthography by the scribe, who would occasionally write the construct feminine the way he pronounced it, rather than the non-phonetic orthographic practice to write it with ‘-h’ ـه.” P.23 | |||
As for the other thousands of instances where feminine words aren’t in construct, QCT spells them all with ‘-h’ although most of them are in positions where they should receive final short vowels which turns the feminine ending to ‘-t’. The 22% incidence of the ‘-t’ spelling in construct and the total lack of the ‘-t’ spelling in non-construct proves that in the language of QCT, the construct is the only position that allows turning the feminine ending into ‘-t’. Which means the QCT language lacked final short vowels which explains why there wasn’t any incidence of the ‘-t’ spelling in non-construct. | |||
4- The pausal hāʾ هاء السكت | |||
This hāʾ is used in the Quran several times for rhyming purposes, except in two instances: | |||
- The word ‘yatasannah’ (yatasanna+h) in 2:259 | |||
ﵟفَٱنظُرۡ إِلَىٰ طَعَامِكَ وَشَرَابِكَ لَمۡ يَتَسَنَّهۡۖ ﵞ | |||
The original form of the word is ‘yatasannā’ يتسنى (yatasannē in Old Hijazi), but the final long vowel is shortened because the word is preceded by the jussive negating particle ‘lam’, yielding the jussive form: yatasanna. Which makes the word an apocopate (a word whose final sound is omitted). | |||
- The imperative word ‘iqtadih’ (iqtadi+h) in 6:90: | |||
ﵟأُوْلَٰٓئِكَ ٱلَّذِينَ هَدَى ٱللَّهُۖ فَبِهُدَىٰهُمُ ٱقۡتَدِهۡۗ ﵞ | |||
The previous two words, yatasannah and iqtadih, are the only two times an apocopate and an imperative occur in in a pausal position. And both of them received a final ‘h’. Which means in the language of QCT, an apocopate or an imperative receives a final ‘h’ in pause. | |||
“'''The fact that this ''hāʔ'' only shows up in pausal position, is yet another piece of evidence that ‘pausal spelling’ is not a governing principle in Quranic orthography. Had that been the case, all apocopates and imperatives should have received a final ''h'', not just the one that stand in a pausal position.” P.291''' | |||
== The Hamzah in the Quranic Reading Traditions == | == The Hamzah in the Quranic Reading Traditions == | ||