The Phonology of Early Islamic Arabic, Based on Coptic Transcriptions, and Informed by Coptic Philology and Linguistics

Bibliographic Data

ID21534580
AuthorsTonio Sebastian Richter (corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume174
Issue1
Pages31-52
Publication date2024-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueZeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0341-0137 • E-ISSN: 2747-4402
PublisherHarrassowitz Publishing House (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.13173/zdmg.174.1.031
OpenAlexW4396671807
LanguageEN
Citations received1

This article provides a follow-up of Marijn van Putten's article on the value of Coptic transcriptions of Arabic words for the historical phonology of Arabic, published in a previous issue of this journal. Fully agreeing with the overall methodology, I argue that its proper application requires more careful consideration of Coptic philology and linguistics. I start with a reflection on the history of Arabic-Greek and Arabic-Coptic language contact in Egypt, the chronological difference of data based on transcribed proper names as opposed to common words, and its potential importance for the phonological assessment of transcriptions. Thereafter I contrast the different regularities of correspondences between Arabic and Coptic phonemes, namely graphemes, in the corpus of Arabic proper names studied by van Putten and in the corpus of Arabic loanwords in Coptic studied by myself. Eventually I examine two alternative scenarios proposed by van Putten to account for Coptic spellings -ⲉ of Arabic -a, thus, the issue of evidence for raising/fronting of Arabic a in certain environments (imāla)

Arabic · Art · Islam · Linguistics · Literature · Philology · Phonology · Sociology · Theology · Archaeology and Historical Studies · Classics · Historical and Linguistic Studies · History · Language, Linguistics, Cultural Analysis · Philosophy

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