Re: Luxenberg's critique



M.S.M. Saifullah wrote:
> On Tue, 21 Jun 2005, Denis Giron wrote:
>
> > Now, as was noted, the initial text (the hypothetical inscription) did
> > not distinguish between sins and shins or ayns and ghayns. Your
> > argument, if I'm not mistaken, would be that you would nonetheless know
> > which is an ayn or ghayn (or shin or sin) based on whether it made
> > sense, correct?
>
> If one knows Arabic, its grammar and the context, it is not that difficult
> to decipher the language. There are many Arabic, Aramaic, Syriac,
> Nabataean, Hebrew and other semitic inscriptions where scholars have
> little problem in reading them.


but the aramaic square script (i.e. essentially what is now called
the "hebrew script") has quite distinct shapes, as does to a lesser
extent the Nabataean script. but as this evovled towards the arabic
script, in the Jahiliya period and the early Islamic period the arabic
script isn't that clearly legible without dots. that's why there are
different readings eof the short pre-islamic inscriptions in arabic
script. agreed, som of the problems are due to our not having too
many examples and not knowing some of the distinctions well (such
as between lam and the "tooth" letters), but still, lack of doting
could potentially create ambiguities.

doting was neccessary because

a) some letters that were dissimilar became in the course of time
similar like /r/ and /z/ .

b) the Aramaic alphabet does not have the full consonantal
inventory of phonemes of arabic.

in these cases, the Nabataeans did soemthing ingenious.

now, Aramaic has the following developments from proto-semitic:

*th* > t , *dh* > d , *DH* > T , *gh* > 3 , x > H

classical arabic preserves the original states for these. what
the Nabataeans did was that to make their names etc. look
less outlandish when written down (i.e. *gh*azza(t) would be
written down as /3zh/ and woudl be pronounced 3azza: by aramaic
speakers, and the same in Hebrew, which is how it is pronounced in
these languages and they chose the aramaic development in
pronounciation of these phonems in their representation
in writing. perhaps some of them devleoped an aramaic
accent in arabic as well, and even may have pronounced
some of them such (NB the development in colloquial arabic
with aramaic infleunce such as urban syrian, jewish and
christian iraqi and the later offshoots of these, that
have *th* > t , *dh* > d , *DH* > D versus those that are closer
to the classical pronounciation, of bedouin origin: muslim iraqi,
gulf, yemen, rural syrian, mauritania and environs (Hassaniya)).
when arabs starting writing in that alpahbet for themselves,
and with the Qur'an proper pronounciation became even more of
an imperative, dots where put to distinguish them.


>
> A few weeks ago I was doing a Powerpoint presentation about the Arabic
> inscriptions on the Dome of the Rock from the time of `Abd al-Malik. When
> the imaam of our community say the sparsely dotted inscriptions, he read
> it correctly. The only training he has was in classical Arabic!


but that is an islamic inscription with quotes or paraphrases
from the Qur'an. not only does your imam have training in classical
arabic, but (I'm sure) he also knows the Qur'an by heart! so the
content is fairly predictable.

for more profane old inscriptions whose content is not known,
you sometimes have various readings by different scholars.
some of it is, as I just said, due to our inexperience,
butthere is soem genuine ambiguity.


dotless writing survived for a long time in coins, which are
difficult to engrave and have predictable legends.

it survived in the monograms of Sultans (the tughra, a turkish
traditon) for aesthetic reasons and also because the content
was predicatble (this is a dotless cursive script).

more signifcantly a type of writing known as siya:qat remained
mostly dotless. this was for financial registers. the idea was
that documents could be altered by adding dots. the not readily
legible character also ensured a certain level of privacy. to
compensate common words were written in specifically individual
stylized forms. again, the content is predictable. one has to
learn the siyaqat of each language or region seperately. it's
as type of shorthand. it was regular in ottoman financial work
until the late 19th cent. it was also used in Iran (somebody
hinted it is still used by bazaar merchants) and (IIRC) muslim
India. numbers were written as siyaqat abbreviations of their
arabic names, but these would frequently be replaced
by "regular" "arabic numerlas" due to their ease in computation.


but when you want to convey information, dotting is essential,
and in the Qur'an, voweling as well.

.

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