- While the concept of the Qurʾānic Consonantal Text is quite similar to the rasm, the undotted consonantal skeleton of the Qurʾānic text, there is one important distinction. While the different reading traditions occasionally disagree on minor points in the consonantal dotting of the rasm, the enormous amount of consensus between the reading traditions suggests a fairly accurate transmission in terms of lexical content of the Qurʾān. The almost completely undotted text, as we find them in the earliest Qurʾānic documents, allows for a virtually endless amount of vastly different readings. However, we do not find great amounts of competing readings of the Qurʾān. For this reason, when discussing the Qurʾānic Consonantal Text in this paper, van Putten assumes that the consonantal dotting as we find it in the modern Cairo edition of the Qurʾān is essentially correct. This assumption is given strength by the fact that, even though early Qurʾān codices such as the Codex Parisino-Petropolitanis discussed by Déroche ibid. are almost completely undotted, the few times that consonants are dotted, we do not find disagreements with the Cairo edition.
- The language of the Qur’anic Consonantal Text, which includes the feminine ending -at as a diptote, likely goes back to a variety of Arabic that was spoken before the time of the Qur’an, which would be an argument for the Qu’rans earliness.
- How does the diptote -at affect our understanding of the consonantal text of the Quran?
- The feminine ending -at in the Qur’anic Consonantal Text behaves like a diptote. This means that it is pronounced differently depending on the grammatical context in which it appears. This diptotic behavior is paralleled in several dialects still spoken today in the Yemen and Saudi Arabia. The fact that the feminine ending -at is a diptote in the Qur’anic Consonantal Text suggests that the language of the text goes back to a variety of Arabic where the feminine ending was treated as a diptote.
- What other linguistic evidence supports the hypothesis that the diptote -at was used in Proto-Arabic?
- Additionally, Ugaritic and Ancient South Arabian show evidence of diptotes, so they can certainly be reconstructed for Proto-West Semitic. Furthermore, Joshua Blau discusses the existence of diptotes in Pre-Islamic Arabic in his work “Problems of Noun Inflection in Arabic: Reflections on the Diptote Declension.” Finally, Peter Behnstedt’s work on the dialects of the region of Ṣaʿdah in North Yemen includes a map that shows the distribution of diptotic feminine endings in the dialects of the region.
- The feminine endings make them diptotic:
What’s the motivation? – One might consider the possibility that the diptosy of the feminine ending developed in this category of proper names, and spread to all feminine nouns. It is, however, difficult to motivate how such a marginal characteristic of proper names would come to be spread analogically to all nouns with the feminine suffix in general. A spread in the opposite direction is much easier to motivate. Feminine common nouns that are regularly derived from masculine nouns may easily have received a triptotic pattern analogous to that of the masculine form. Because proper names with the feminine ending do not have the same morphological relation to triptotic masculine names, the same spread did not affect them. The diptotic feminine ending of the proper names is thus to be considered a linguistic vestige in Classical Arabic of the original diptotic nature of the feminine ending -at. The retention of this vestige was perhaps aided by the diptosy of many other proper names. In Sabaic, the vast majority of the nouns in the absolute state have mīmation, the structural equivalent to Arabic nūnation, this includes feminine nouns with the feminine ending -t. However, Sabaic names, masculine or feminine, generally lack mīmation, which is presumably a reflection of the same tendency to diptosy that we find in Arabic proper names.
- As can be seen in the table above, one would expect the indefinite form of the feminine ending to have orthographically two forms, a nominative/genitive �ـ and an accusative. However, such a spelling for the accusative is not attested in the Qurʾānic Consonantal Text. Several researchers have attempted to explain this problem.
- Harris Birkeland suggests that nūnation was lost on the feminine ending -at before the masculine ending, thus yielding different result. However, this solution is totally ad hoc.
- Wolfdietrich Fischer suggests that the spellings of the Qurʾānic Consonantal Text orthography cannot represent the “pausal spellings” of the noun with endings *-atu/i/a(n), as the indefinite accusative was pronounced /-ah/ in pause, e.g. This is also ad hoc.
- Marjin van Putten’s solution:
- that the language of the Qurʾānic Consonantal Text had a diptotic feminine ending -at- rather than a triptotic one as found in Classical Arabic. Diptotes in the indefinite do not take nūnation and as a result, all case endings would drop off in pause and yield the attested result. Diptotic should be taken here to mean mamnūʿ min al-ṣarf, and does not include the sound masculine plural suffixes (-ūna/-īna), sound feminine plural suffixes (-ātu(n)/- āti(n)) or the dual ending (-āni/-ayni). The recent suggestion by Muhammad al-Sharkawi, “Case-Marking in Pre-Islamic Arabic: The Evolutionary Status,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, 62 (2015), p. 38-67 that diptotes are an innovation in Classical Arabic cannot be upheld. As has long been recognised, Nabataean Arabic makes a clear distinction between diptotic and triptotic names. Triptotic names receive wāwation whereas diptotic names (mostly names with the afʿal-pattern, the -ān suffix or the -at suffix) have a zero ending. For a discussion see, Joshua Blau, “Problems of Noun Inflection in Arabic: Reflections on the Diptote Declension,” in Biblical Hebrew in its Northwest Semitic Setting: Typological and Historical Perspectives, eds Steven Ellis Fassberg and Avi Hurvitz, Winona Lake-Jerusalem, Eisenbrauns-Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2006, p. 27-32. Therefore, diptotes are clearly part of Pre-Islamic Arabic. Moreover, as will be shown below, Ugaritic and Ancient South Arabian show evidence of diptotes, so they can certainly be reconstructed for Proto-West Semitic.
- Anyways, this argues for the Qur’an’s earliness philologically.
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