...
You said that Qur'anic spelling is conservative. Although this, I
guess, is right (actually, originally not so much the written, but the
spoken, recited text was holy to Muslims), if the ل laam had been
there already before some consonants (obviously the case), we first
have to know how long this spelling already existed; Arabic wasn't
born for the Qur'an only.
A certain spelling may just be very convenient, without representing a
historical development in all cases. In Korean script, an alphabet
that was designed by scholars, letters are written that have never
existed, but they give a hint to the etymology of the preceding
syllable. Arabic consonantal spelling represents sounds that are not
written (vowels, geminations), why would it not have some signs that
do not represent a sound, for a change?
As I said before, the dissimilation needs to have been innovated in
only one or a few consonants, say ع `ayn or ب baa'; and by analogy it
could have been taken over for other consonants too.
"Popular etymology" is a notorious cause of historic-linguistic
falsification, so people may have thought: "that little sound -l- we
hear, it must be something relevant; let's write it down; if we don't
hear it, for example "(a)d-dars", but in an analogous form,
"(a)l-baab" we do hear it, we'll write it there too! After all it
should have been there in the first place." It is very convenient to
have the laam there to indicate a gemination. After all Arabic is a
stenographic type of script; matres lectionis also developed gradually
in the Semitic laguages, for the sake of easier understanding only.
For clarity's sake: the alif can represent: 1) the vowel ā; 2) a hamz
(glottal stop); 3) a separation at the end of a 3rd person plural
perfect (cf. قالوا qālū) (which is only a straight, vertical line,
nevertheless considered to be an alif); 4) an auxiliary vowel (cf.
Qur'an 7,155 واختار موسى wa-ḵtāra mūsā, with its alifu l-wasli
completely unpronounced). All four cases happen all the time.
Therefore, I do not understand the tendency to think that in Arabic,
everything that's written must be a historical consonant. ...
... How many
letters in the English word /thought/ are historical? Both -th- and
-gh- represent only one historical consonant each, not two. Cf. Dutch
/dacht/. As English took an alphabet, the Latin one, that didn't
exactly fit, this is quite understandable. Just because for the Arabic
language, a distinct-looking script has evolved, it doesn't mean all
its consonant-signs represent one consonant each, all the time. This
would be quite unique, taking into account spelling systems all over
the world. Even Korean's unique, specially invented script is not
strictly phonetic: it writes unpronounced letters all the time, only
in order to present a word's root in one syllable.
For the sake of simplicity, hoewever, let's assume, against my
conviction, that not the gemination but the ل l- is the original
article. Classical Arabic grammar states quite clearly: the alif of
the article (a)l- ال should never be given a hamza! This means that
the medieval native Arabic speakers, the grammarians among them, did
not think the alif there ever represented a consonant. ...
...
You think it is improbable that Epyptian, rather than "Arabian"
Arabic, would have more conservative traits. As I said before: I think
there are no linguistic reasons why this would not be possible. A
language can be imported or not, this doesn't always matter. In India,
English -a- in dance is pronounced in an older pronunciation ([dahns])
than in North America: [dehns]. ...
... In Egyptian Arabic we have the ج Jiim of several other dialects andI take the point. But it seems to me rather likely that ج Jiim was pronounced like English G rather than J at the time of the Qur'an and the dispersal of Arabic across the Muslim world, and the pronunciation shift to J came later. It is much less likely that Egyptian Arabic reversed the pronunciation change.
Modern Standard Arabic pronounced as Giim, so -G- in "give", not -J-
in "jest". In Hebrew the corresponding ג gimel, pronunciation -G- in
"give", seems to represent, like Egyptian Arabic ج, the older version
(cf. Greek's gamma Γ, also pronounced that way). If so, Egyptian
Arabic's double -KK- and -GG- in the article may also preserve the
older, not the younger state, in comparison to MSA.
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