COBHUNI Lecture: The fourth long vowel of Quranic ArabicLecture by Dr. Marijn van Putten, on Tuesday 12 June 2018, Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, Room 136, 14pm

12 June 2018

The Language of the Quran has been subject to much debate in the past century; These days, a virtual consensus seems to have formed that the language was close or identical to Classical Arabic. This seems to be primarily based on the assumption that the most dominant reading tradition today, that of Ḥafṣ, is an accurate representation of the language of the Quran. However, there are seven canonical readings, which occasionally disagree significantly with each other and all of them were only canonized in the 4th Islamic century, hundreds of years after the composition of the Quran. It is therefore difficult to be sure that these are accurate representations of the language the Quran was composed in. The Quranic Consonantal Text is the only part of the Quran that can, with certainty, be traced back to the early Islamic period. In order to gain insight into what the language of the Quran is, we should use this important primary source. Through the application of the traditional philological toolkit, examining orthography, rhyme and etymology, I will show that there is strong evidence that the language of the Quran had a fourth long vowel ē, besides ā, ī and ū.