PhDniX's blog

Transcribing Quranic Reading Traditions

In the previous post, I highlighted some common pitfalls encountered in transcribing Classical Arabic. This post will discuss several of the specific issue that occur when talking about the Quranic reading traditions. While most of it follows quite naturally from the specifications suggested above, in some cases a more precise specification is necessary.

ʾImālah

Most reading traditions have additional vowels distinct from the standard Classical Arabic a, i, u, ā, ī, ū. First of all there is ʾimālah, a vowel that is in between ā and ī, i.e. ē. This can easily be transcribed that way.

• Q11:41 (Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim): maǧrē-hā
• Q20:1 (Warš ʿan Nāfiʿ): ṭā-hē
• Q6:68 (ʾAbū ʿAmr): ḏikrē

Bayna al-Lafẓayn

Some of the readers use a sound that stands in between ā and ē. Variously known as taqlīl, bayna al-lafẓayn or ʾimālah bayna bayn. This could be transcribed with something that is line with the international phonetic alphabet ǣ, but I prefer ǟ as it is more consistent with the sign needed for ʾišmām of hollow passives as we will see below.

• Q2:19 (Warš ʿan Nāfiʿ) al-kǟfirīna 
• Q20:8 (ʾAbū ʿAmr) al-ḥusnǟ

ʾIšmām al-Ḍamm of consonants

ʾIšmām is not pronouncing the u completely but rather only keeping the liprounding. This is thus essentially labialization, and can easily be transcribed with ʷ.

• Q12:11 (all readers but ʾAbū Ǧaʿfar): lā taʾmanʷnā
• Q27:40 (ʾAbū ʿAmr with ʾidġām kabīr and ʾišmām option): yaškulʷ-li-nafsihī
• Q1:5 (e.g. Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim with the ʾišmām in pause option): nastaʿīnʷ#

ʾIšmām al-Ḍamm al-Kasr of Passive Hollow Verbs

Several Quranic reciters used ʾišmām on passive hollow verbs like qīla 'it is said'. In modern recitation this is often considered to be the same labialization as the ʾišmām discussed above. If following this option the same transcription could be used, i.e. qʷīla. However, several medieval writers make it explicit (and it is often implicit) that these are qualitatively different. In these cases it rather refers to a rounding of the complete ī vowel. The resulting sound is thus identical to the German or Turkish ü. Transcribing it as ǖ is therefore obvious. A transcription with ȳ, which would be closer to a transcription in line with the International Phonetic Alphabet is to be dispreferred because y is already being used to represent the yāʾ. In some transmissions that have by now become rare, a short version of this vowel also occurs which can thus be transcribed as ü.

• Q2:11 (al-Kisāʾī, Ḥišām ʿan Ibn ʿĀmir): qǖla
• Q11:77 (Nāfiʿ, al-Kisāʾī, Ibn ʿĀmir): sǖʾa
• Q2:189 (al-Kisāʾī as recorded by Ibn Muǧāhid): al-büyūta

Iḫtilās and Rawm

In certain contexts, short vowels are pronounced ultrashort in the Quranic reading traditions, this is called Iḫtilās al-Ḥarakah. This happens in certain readings for certain specific lexical items. It is also an option in pause for short vowels u and i in which case it is called Rawm. I suggest transcribing this with a breve above the relevant short vowel, i.e. ă, ĭ, ŭ.

• Q7:157 (ʾAbū ʿAmr): yaʾmurŭhum
• Q10:35 (ʾAbū ʿAmr): yahăddī
• Q2:271 (Qālūn ʿan Nāfiʿ, Šuʿbah ʿan ʿĀṣim, ʾAbū ʿAmr): fa-niʿĭmmā
• Q1:5 (e.g. Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim with the rawm option): nastaʿīnŭ
• Q1:1 (e.g. Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim with the rawm option): ar-raḥīmĭ

Madd 

In Quranic recitation, some vowels need to be pronounced overlong. This occurs whenever the long vowel appears 1. before hamzah or 2. stands in a closed syllable. There is some disagreement between the readers whether a hamzah in the next word also triggers an overlong vowels, but within a single reading madd is perfectly predictable. In Muṣḥafs this is printed with the maddah sign. As the places where madd occurs are predictable, it is not really necessary to transcribe it. However, if for the discussion it is relevant to discuss madd, I suggest to write it as two long vowels in a row, e.g.

• Q1:7: wa-lā ḍ-ḍāāllīna
• Q6:80 (e.g. Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim): ʾa-tuḥāāǧǧūūnnī
• Q70:1 sāāʾilun
• Q2:49 sūūʾa l-ʿaḏābi
• Q6:19 barīīʾun

Hamzah Bayna Bayn

Several readers do not allow two hamzahs in succession, and soften one from a glottal stop to a simple hiatus. I propose to transcribe this with a . in between the two vowels.

• Q2:6 (e.g. ʾAbū ʿAmr) ʾa.anḏartahum
• Q3:15 (e.g. ʾAbū ʿAmr) ʾa.unabbiʾukum

Naql

Whenever a word ends in a consonant (including the definite article) and the next word starts with hamzah, Warš ʿan Nāfiʿ elides the hamzah. And this is one of the reasons why it is important to write word-initial hamzah, as otherwise you are unable to distinguish it.

• Warš ʿan Nāfiʿ: al-arḍ versus the other readers: al-ʾarḍ
• Warš ʿan Nāfiʿ: al-āḫirah versus the other readers al-ʾāḫirah
• Warš ʿan Nāfiʿ: kufuʾan aḥadun versus the other readers kufuʾan ʾaḥadun (or kufʾan ʾaḥadun or kufuwan ʾaḥadan)
• Warš ʿan Nāfiʿ: qālat uḫrǟhum versus the other readers qālat ʾuḫrāhum (or ʾuḫrēhum, ʾuḫrāhumū)
• Warš ʿan Nāfiʿ: wa-ḏkur ismāʿīl versus the other readers wa-ḏkur ʾismāʿīl.

ʾIšmām al-Ṣād al-Zāy

In some readings the ṣād is pronounced with voicing [zˁ], this is called ʾišmām al-ṣād al-zāy. This sound is awkward to represent with most Classical Arabic transcription systems because the emphatic interdental fricative is transcribed as <ẓ>. This is an awkward choice for a sound that is properly pronounced as a voiced emphatic interdental fricative [ðˁ], and <ḏ̣> would have been more appropriate (and this is the sign that Arabic dialectologists and Berberologists use for the sound, which opens them up to use ẓ for the voiced emphatic alveolar grooved fricative [zˁ]). However, it seems awkward to break with the tradition of using the <ẓ> sign for ظ only so that we can accommodate the admittedly very marginal phenomenon discussed here. So instead I suggest the use of ṣ with a superscript z, i.e. ṣᶻ.

• Q1:6 (Ḫalaf ʿan Ḥamzah) al-ṣᶻirāṭa
• Q4:87 (al-Kisāʾī, Ḥamzah, Ḫalaf) ʾaṣᶻdaqu

I'm probably forgetting some stuff again. But this covers most of the main issues!

 

Transcribing Classical Arabic

When it comes to transcription of languages I can be very pedantic. Decisions that are made need to 1. be consistent 2. actually be a reflection of how the language is to be pronounced. This strike me as self-evident, but time and time again, I find that people do a bad job at these things. This post will be a summary of some common pitfalls in people's transcriptions of Classical Arabic, seemingly due to grammar books doing a poor job at explaining these things.

While I myself tend to vary somewhat between what transcription systems I use, depending on the audience, using signs transparent to linguists when I write more linguistic articles, I personally find that the DMG transcription is mostly excellent, and I use it in works aimed at a more Arabist audience (with some minor tweaks), The problem however is that the article that explains the transcription system does a poor job at explaining some of the common pitfalls.

The 3rd person masculine suffix

Most people, when transcribing Classical Arabic, tend to transcribe the pronominal suffix -hu/-hi without a long vowel in all contexts. This is incorrect. In Classical Arabic, the forms with a short vowel -hu/-hi are only used after heavy syllables: katabnāhu 'we wrote it', minhu 'from it', fīhi 'in it', ʿalayhi 'on it'. When the suffix follows a light syllable, this suffix has a long vowel -hū/-hī, i.e. ʾinnahū 'verily, he', bihī 'with it'.

It is somewhat understandable that people get this wrong. Classical Arabic orthography in Naskh script (usually) does not have good tools to express this distinction, using هُ for -hu and -hū and هِ for -hi and -hī. In the Naskh style, occasionally we see that -hi and -hī are distinguished, where the former is spelled هِ and the latter هٖ. This becomes standard practice in Ottoman Qurans. It annoys me to no end that they never thought to come up a similar visual distinction between -hu and -hū... but what can you do. Modern print Qurans from the Indian subcontinent did devise such a distinction, using an up-side-down ḍammah for -hū: هٗ.

In the Maghreb, in carefully vocalised manuscripts we see that for -hū a miniature wāw is written below the hāʾ  and for -hī a miniature returning yāʾ is written above the hāʾ. A similar practice is found in modern print Qurans like the Cairo Edition and the Medina Mushaf, which write a wāw and yāʾ after the hāʾ.

The Feminine demonstrative pronoun

Similar to the 3rd person masculine suffixes, The feminine demonstrative pronoun, despite being written هذه in fact ends with a long vowel hāḏihī in connected speech. Therefore the common transcription hāḏihi is wrong.

Iltiqāʾ al-Sākinayn

Very few people seem to know the proper rules for what to do with a word that ends in a consonant followed by a word that starts with two consonants with no intervening vowel, this is known as Iltiqāʾ al-Sākinayn. As a general rule, an epenthetic vowel is inserted and this epenthetic vowel is -i.

• qālat-i l-yahūdu
• ʾaw-i mraʾatun
• ʾiḏ-i ẓ-ẓālimūna
• man-i ttaḫaḏa
• raǧulun-i ftarā

One main exception to this is the plural pronominal forms that end in -m (-hum, -tum, -kum, kum, ʾantum). In these cases the epenthetic vowel is always u.

• kānū hum-u ẓ-ẓālimīna
• ʾa-fa-raʾaytum-u l-māʾa

As to the treatment of the harmonized for -him, so few people get this right that I'm not even sure what the standard form "should" be. The grammarians say both -him-i and -him-u are acceptable. -him-u is the form used by the most common Quranic reading traditions, and it is probably safe to go with that.

When a word that ends in a consonant occurs before a word that starts with two consonants followed by a stem-vowel u like the imperative (u)ḫruǧ, the grammarian allow both vowel harmony and no vowel harmony, e.g. ʾaw-u ḫruǧū and ʾaw-i ḫruǧū. The latter is the easier practice so probably best to stick to that.

For the verbal plural ending -aw such as in ʾātaw or taḫšaw, the connecting vowel is always u. Here the -u vowel is the only options, -i is incorrect.

• ʾātaw-u z-zakāta
• taḫšaw-u n-nāsa

The preposition min has an exceptional status. Whenever it precedes the definite article its epenthetic vowel is -a, e.g. min-a n-nāsi. When it precedes another ʾalif al-waṣl, it is -i: min-i mriʾin.

The first person pronoun

While the first person pronoun, from its spelling, might look like it is pronounced ʾanā, this is incorrect. It is pronounced ʾana with a short vowel. Only when pausing upon this word the form is ʾanā. In modern prints of the Quran this is absolutely clear, as أنا consistently has a small circle on top of the second ʾalif to indicate that it is not pronounced.

The pausal indefinite accusative

Most people get the pausal forms of nouns right when dealing with any case form but the indefinite accusative. Thus, most know that it is raǧul for raǧulun, raǧulin and ar-raǧul for ar-raǧulu, ar-raǧuli and ar-raǧula. But for some reason it is fashionable to render the indefinite accusative raǧulan not as the correct raǧulā but keep the non-pausal form with the tanwīn. This is no doubt inspired by Modern Standard Arabic, where this is quite common even in pause (nobody says ʾahlan wa-sahlā). However, if the goal is to transcribe Classical Arabic, this is incorrect. raǧulā is the correct form.

The pausal feminine ending -at-

The feminine ending -at- in pause is frequently transcribed simply as -a. This is in line with the Modern Standard Arabic pronunciation, and thus quite defensible in that context. However, for Classical Arabic, the proper pronunciation is -ah and therefore should be transcribed as such. The -a spelling is especially annoying to me in the transcription of the Quran where the feminine ending -atun clearly rhymes with -a-hū in pause, thus obviously showing that they are both pronounced identically: -ah, rhymes with -a-h.

As a side-note, those feminine nouns with a long vowel before it like aṣ-ṣalātu in their pausal form should be aṣ-ṣalāh. Again, in Modern Standard Arabic aṣ-ṣalāt is popular, but incorrect for Classical Arabic.

Word-initial hamzah is phonemic and should be written

Because word-initial vowels in European languages are automatically preceded by a glottal stop (hamzah), transcribers tend to think of word-initial hamzah in Arabic as just being 'automatic'. However, it is phonemically salient, and therefore better written. This is a place where I deviate from the DMG transcription system. In absolute word-initial position not writing the hamzah is not something so terrible that it is a hill that I'll die on, but I find it useful to write it because it gives us a chance to indicate a difference in behaviour between ism (which loses its initial vowel in connected speech) and ʾiṯm (which does not lose its initial vowel).

After the definite article, not writing it becomes extremely confusing. الاسم is pronounced [alism] and الإثم is pronounced [alʔiθm]. They are spelled differently in Arabic orthography, they are pronounced distinct, so the common al-ism and **al-iṯm is confusing and wrong. The latter should be spelled al-ʾiṯm.

The plural base ʾul-

Several forms use the plural pronominal base ʾul-, e,g, ʾulāʾika "those". Despite its spelling with wāw: أولئك the base is not pronounced with a long vowel **ʾūl-, and therefore should not be transcribed as such.

ūw and uww, īy and iyy are not interchangeable.

Sometimes we see that authors have the tendency to write uww (ḍammah followed by a wāw that carries a šaddah) as ūw, but the latter is proper to ḍammah followed by wāw followed by another wāw. These two sequences are contrastive and should be treated as such. Thus the passive of qawwala is quwwila قُوِّلَ and the passive of qāwala is qūwila قُووِلَ. Admittedly, it is a lot harder to find a contrastive pair between īy and iyy, but iyy still better reflects the orthography and pronunciation so I see no reason why we would transcribe this īy, better to use the spelling that parallels the ūw/uww contrast.

Aḷḷāh not Allāh!

Another pet peeve that I have with the transcription of Arabic is that the name of God is written with a normal lām. This would be fine if we were dealing with a transliteration, after all, the Arabic script does not distinguish it from a normal lām either. However, a transcription aimed at rendering the pronunciation of Classical Arabic should make this distinction as it is a separate sound. The name of God is pronounced with a velarized long l [lˁː] whenever a or u precede, and if one were to pronounce it as a non-emphatic version of the name, you would be pronouncing the name wrong. Therefore, the convention of writing an underdot for emphatic consonants should be adhered to here as well. i.e. mina ḷḷāhi, li-llāhi, fa-zāda-hum-u ḷḷāhu.

That is all for now. I may think of some more issues in transcription, and then will update accordingly. I will probably write another post soon on how to transcribe Quranic reading traditions.

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 Q6:61 ٮوڡٮه 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.

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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. Q8:18 موهن كيد الكفرين  "weakening the plot of the deniers" read both: mūhinun/muwahhinun kayda l-kāfirīna and mūhinu kaydi l-kāfirīna.
2. Q61:8 متم نوره "perfecting his light" read both mutimmun nūrahū and mutimmu nūrihī 
3. Q65:3 بلغ 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 / Q40:62 خلق كل شي "the creator of everything" read only ḫāliqu kulli šayʔin.
2. Q35:38 علم 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. Q11:12 ترك بعض ما يوحى اليك tārikun baʕda mā yūḥā ʔilayka 'leaving out some of what is revealed to you'
2. Q18:6 / Q26:3 بخع 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 Q15:28 خلق 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.

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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. Q3:9 جامع الناس jāmiʿu n-nāsi 'gathering mankind'
2. Q3:185 ذايقه 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.