Old Hijazi: Difference between revisions

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:

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.

{{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.}}

(for a detailed explanation see [[Internal Rhymes as Evidence for Old Hijazi|this article]])

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.

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:

- The dropping of the vowel of the third person masculine singular pronoun: Kitābuhū => Kitābuh.

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: