Is the Quran Written in Middle Arabic? (Spoiler Alert: No.)
As I have essentially finished my series on the Quranic orthography for now, I thought it would be a fun test to look at some of the definitions of Middle Arabic defined by Joshua Blau in A Handbook of...
View ArticleWhen Orthography conflicts with Sensible spelling
In Dutch, past participles of weak verbs are formed by the prefix ge- and followed by a dental suffix -d or -t followed by inflectional suffix -e (definite; indefinite masc./fem.) or -en (plural). The...
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God exists! Or: The strategic use of a religious register.
Something I like to pull out in my class Language Power & Identity, for the Humanities Lab, is a little pamphlet simply titled "God Bestaat" (God Exists). The pamphlet is quite interesting in a...
View ArticleThe Quran in relation to Pre-Islamic poetry
First of all: Fantastic news! Last week Wednesday I got word that I got the VENI research grant to research Arabic of the Early Islamic period. I'm incredibly happy that I was lucky enough to get this...
View ArticleThe Alif al-Wiqāyah in the QCT
The Alif al-Wiqāyah or 'Alif of protection' is an orthographical device in Classical Arabic where a <ʔ> is placed after a <w> in 3pl.m. verbs, e.g.ḏahabū ذهبوا <ḏhbwʔ> 'they went',...
View ArticleHimyaritic: Old Yemeni Arabic?
Al-Hamdani, the 10th century polymath, speaks in his Jazīra of a group of people known as the Himyar, who lived in Yemen and spoke a language different from the Arabic he was familiar with.He makes...
View ArticleA non-Classical Hadith?
Recently Prof. Petra Sijpesteijn uploaded an interesting article about a 7th/8th-century papyrus that contains a fragment of a Hadith attributed to Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second caliph. While the...
View ArticleSilent Waw and the origins of Alif Al-Wiqāyah
In my recent blogpost on the alif al-wiqāyah I argued that <wʔ> denotes final vowels /ū/ and /ō/ (or /aw/) in the orthography of the QCT. While final <w> denoted actual consonantal /w/....
View ArticleThamudic triptotes and the issue of discontinuity
In my blogpost Is Thamud a triptote? I suggested that the name of the people ṯamūd was a triptote in the language of the QCT, rather than a diptote as it is in Classical Arabic. A triptotic inflection...
View ArticleFifty-Two or Fifty-Six?
A recent article by Ali ibn Ibrahim Ghabban & Robert Hoyland, discussing the earliest discovered Islamic Inscription, a short footnote (#16) states that the Khashnah inscription should be dated to...
View ArticleProto-Berber reconstructions of terms of Animal Husbandry
I recently sat down to read the wonderful article by the Naima Louali & Gérard Philippson (2004) "Berber expansion into and within north-west Africa: a linguistic distribution", Afrika und Übersee,...
View ArticleThe people of the Thicket: Evidence for multiple scribes of a single...
The Quran speaks in multiple places about a ʔaṣḥābu l-ʔaykah'Companions of the Wood/Thicket', a people associated with the prophet Šuʕayb, traditionally taken to be the same person as the Biblical...
View Articleʔibrāhām: Is the Hišām tradition based on a written Codex?
The Islamic name ابرهيم ʔibrāhīm, has always been somewhat puzzling. While this is of course the same name as our Abraham̨ from the Hebrew ʔaḇråhåm, we are left with an unanswered problem in the final...
View ArticleBedouin-Type Arabic Syllabification
A robust group of dialects that span from the Najd, all the way to the gulf, southern Iraq and Libya are the dialects that may be called the 'Bedouin-Type' (for lack of a better term). These can be...
View ArticleAgain on Bedouin-Type Arabic Syllabification
Last night, I discussed in some depth the syllabification of the Bedouin-Type Arabic dialects.I worked mostly from Owens' description, which got me a little caught up in a bind, as I had no way to...
View ArticleWas Ibn Mujāhid misunderstood by al-Jazarī?
[NOTE: I'm probably wrong about this whole argument, luckily pointed out by Lameen Souag in the comments, see the comments for the discussion.]For a long time, I've been struck by the irregular nature...
View ArticleHow Linguistically Unified was Pre-Islamic Poetry?
A starting assumption present among many Arabists is that the ʕarabiyyah -- or Poetic Koine -- was a form of the Arabic language, quite close to what we now know as Classical Arabic, and that it...
View ArticleThe feminine ending: A "hypercorrection" in orthographic innovation?
Motivated by the posting of a series of religious early Islamic inscriptions on Twitterwrittenbywomen, I'd like to discuss once again the spelling of the feminine ending in Arabic.One of the striking...
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Pre-Islamic dotted dāl in a 7th c. Quran
Ahmad Al-Jallad, Younis al-Shdaifat, Zeyad al-Salameen and Rafe Harahsheh recently published a fascinating article that has come out in Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy. Al-Jallad argues that it is a...
View ArticleMaʕāyiš: An irregularity in Classical Arabic grammar
The Quran attests the word معيش maʕāyiš'ways of life, livelihoods' twice, Q7:10 and Q15:20. This is the plural of معيشه maʕīšah 'way of life, livelihood'. While this would be exactly the form that I...
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