The Quranic Reading Traditions and Case

Probably my most controversial idea concerning the grammar of Quranic Arabic, is that I think there is a good case to be made that Quranic Arabic had a greatly reduce case system, not having tanwīn only retaining the indefinite accusative as /-ā/, and probably keeping /-a/, /-i/, /-u/ otherwise only in construct.

This view is by no means new, over a century ago Vollers already made a case similar to this (though he considered the system to be even more reduced). But I believe my colleague Phillip Stoke and I have made a very solid case for it, that takes the Uthmanic rasm and the linguistic information held within it seriously.

However, this conclusion necessarily means that the Quranic reading traditions, which all universally have this system, classicized their readings towards the now prestigious Classical Arabic system. A big question then becomes: when exactly did that happen? Who added these case vowels? Was it a single moment early on, or was it done individually in different places?

In my opinion, it is quite clear that the different Quranic reading traditions retain, to a large extent, a genuine shared memory of what the text is suppose to say. Even though there are hundreds of places where they disagree, sometimes clearly seeming to stem from guessing what the rasm might mean, there are many more places where the readers could have conceivably disagreed, but consistently do not.

As an example Q6:61ٮوڡٮه رسلٮا can reasonably be read as tawaffat-hu rusulunā or tawaffā-hu rusulunā"our messengers take him away", that is either with feminine or masculine agreement. When focusing on "our messengers" as an undifferentiated group, feminine agreement makes sense, while when taking it up as a plurality of individual masculine beings the masculine agreement makes sense. But in the vast majority of the cases, all readers agree, even in highly non-trivial cases. This simply could not happen if all readers were simply individually guessing at an ambiguous rasm. There was some kind of shared understanding that predated even the earliest canonical readers.

But this brings me to the question: did this reading that formed a shared understanding of the interpretation of the rasm, a Proto-Reading, if you will, did this shared understanding already have the Classical case system in place?

That question is much less easy to answer than one would think. It has long been recognized that the functional load of the Arabic (and Semitic) case system is extremely low. In the vast majority of the cases, case is perfectly predictable. The fact that all readers agree in those places cannot be seen as an argument in favour of Classicization happening before or after the Proto-Reading. No, we have to find places where the case marking is ambiguous and nevertheless the readers are in agreement to a significant degree. If we find that, we would have to conclude that the Proto-Reading contained information about where case could go.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, a good place to look for whether such information is contained in the Proto-Reading, is to look for places where readers disagree. This helps us find types of constructions that are potentially readable in two different ways with more-or-less the same semantics, without affect the rasm.

One such an example where we see this happen is in participles. In Arabic, participles can function more, or less like a verb. And the object that follows may either be placed in the accusative, as if the participle preceding was a verb, or in the genitive, and then the participle will be in the construct state. Thus you can have ḍāribu ʔaxīhi 'hitting his borther' or ḍāribun ʾaxā-hu'id.' Those two can be told apart in unvocalised text due to the special status of أخ 'brother', but in most cases you could not see the difference without short vowels.

Indeed, such constructions are sometimes disagreed upon among the readers. For example:

1. Q8:18موهن كيد الكفرين  "weakening the plot of the deniers" read both: mūhinun/muwahhinun kayda l-kāfirīna and mūhinu kaydi l-kāfirīna.
2. Q61:8متم نوره "perfecting his light" read both mutimmun nūrahū and mutimmu nūrihī 
3. Q65:3بلغ امره "brining his command to pass" read both bāliġu ʔamrihī and bāliġun ʔamrahū.

Interestingly, in case one and three, Ḥafṣ is the only one that transmits this reading. 

There are also places where all readers are in agreement on how to read, in otherwise comparable environments. The ones I have found in the construct construction are technically only 2 phrases, of which one reoccurs 4 times:

1. Q6:102 / Q13:16 / Q39:62 / Q40:62خلق كل شي "the creator of everything" read only ḫāliqu kulli šayʔin.
2. Q35:38علم غيب السموت "the knower of the hidden realm" read only as ʕālimu ġaybi s-samāwāti. [However, among the non-canonical readers ʕālimun ġayba is repotered for Janāḥ b. Ḥubayš]

Of the accusative option I have found the following:

1. Q11:12ترك بعض ما يوحى اليك tārikun baʕda mā yūḥā ʔilayka'leaving out some of what is revealed to you'
2. Q18:6 / Q26:3بخع نفسك bāxiʕun nafsaka 'killing yourself' [However, among the non-canonical readers we find bāxiʕu nafsika attributed to Qatādah at Q26:3, also recorded as a secondary reading in manuscripts]

There are a couple of other cases, but here the rasm is not ambiguous such as Q15:28خلق بشرا xāliqun bašaran 'creating a man', which would be distinct from **خلق بشر xāliqu bašarin.

I'm not exactly sure how to calculate the significance of this agreement, but it seems very unlikely that this is very meaningful. This distribution of agreement could likely have happened by chance, or later consensus creation.

An interesting side note is the following. In principle this it seems possible to have this kind of constructional ambiguity with participles followed by an object with a definite article, i.e. xāliqun-i l-ʔarḍa'creating the earth', besides xāliqu l-ʔarḍi 'creator/creating the earth'. But the former construction never occurs in the Quran, and was apparently not part of the possible grammatical constructions.

1. Q3:9جامع الناس jāmiʿu n-nāsi 'gathering mankind'
2. Q3:185ذايقه الموت ḏāʔiqatu l-mawti 'tasting death'

I don't know where this is going yet, but there might be some follow-up posts after this, as I find more comparable constructions that could be read in two ways, and show agreement and/or disagreement.