Menyoal Kritik Orientalis terhadap Qirā’at: Studi Kritis terhadap Pemikiran Arthur Jefrey Mengenai Ragam Bacaan Al-Qur’an

Arthur Jeffery (1892-1959) was an Australian orientalist who was quite influential in the 20th century. He is well known for his philosophical thoughts on the Qur’an. He even wanted to restore the al-Qur’an text based on Ibn Abī Dāwud al-Sijistānī’s Kitab al-Maṣāḥif which is thought to have recorded readings (qirā’at) in several counter-manuscripts - rival codices. This article examines his thoughts on the variety of reading (qirā’at) of the al-Qur’an. The method used is descriptive-qualitative. From the study conducted, it was found that the following results were: 1) Arthur Jeffery considered that the Mushaf ‘Uthmānī which had a dot and a diacritical mark was a factor in the birth of the variety of reading for the al-Qur’an. According to him, this is a free opportunity for readers to mark themselves according to the context of the verse they understand, 2) Arthur's thought is natural because he uses a text-critical study approach to the Qur’an - as a method. it was used by the Orientalists of the Bible. 3) the use of text-critical studies of the Qur’an as done by Arthur is a fatal basic mistake, because after all the process of transmitting the Koran in the early Islamic century was an oral tradition, so the accusations made by Arthur about qirā’at It is easy to argue with, 4) The use of the term variant reading - by orientalists including Arthur Jeffery is considered a failure by Islamic thinkers in representing the meaning of qirā’at, because it implies uncertainty about the truth of the qiraat itself. So that al-A’ẓamī prefers the term multiple reading, because it is more in accordance with the historical facts of the al-Qur’an transmission which accommodates many dialects of Arabic society.

Jaunu burtu veidošana ar diakritiskajām zīmēm latviešu valodas kā svešvalodas apguvēju tekstos

A Latvian learner corpus “LaVA” is being built in the Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Latvia. The corpus includes texts written by beginner learners in the first two semesters of learning Latvian as a foreign language. The texts are written by hand and digitized afterwards in order to reduce the issues that could be caused by the necessity to learn not only writing itself but also using a foreign keyboard. One of the features that cannot be digitized is the new letters created by adding diacritical marks which are not used that way in the standard Latvian alphabet. Since one of the essential steps in learning to write in a language is learning the letters and diacritical marks of that language, this study aims to find instances of such newly made letters and to discuss the basic quantitative measures in order to define hypotheses and areas of interest for further research of such usage. Altogether 322 texts were searched, and 175 examples were found. The amount of examples found in 2nd semester texts was less than half the amount of examples found in the 1st semester texts, but the percentage of texts containing examples was higher than expected – more than 33 % in the 1st semester and almost 20 % in the 2nd semester. It leads to a conclusion that this is quite a common occurrence but also prone to reduction in the second semester. The corpus does not provide any data on later semesters so it cannot be predicted when such instances should become a rare, individual feature rather than a common one. The average amount of examples in a text is not high, though. Counting only the texts where at least one example was found, the average amount of examples per text is 2.136 in the 1st semester and 1.690 in the 2nd semester. Considering that the absolute lowest possible value here is 1, it should not be considered as a high value. Therefore, using diacritical marks to make new letters, while a common feature of the Latvian interlanguage, could be characterized as casual rather than systemic. However, that does not exclude the possibility of certain patterns in usage. The currently collected data already shows that there are some words – such as garšo, viņš, ļoti, četri – where examples were found in more than one author’s text. Examples of using unsuitable diacritical marks are also sometimes found next to letters for which said diacritical marks would be suitable. This should be explored more thoroughly using qualitative methods. The size of the corpus keeps growing; the expected size upon completion is 1000 texts. When it is reached, it would be useful to repeat the study and check whether the larger amount of data still confirms the same assumptions. The larger sample size would also allow for more detailed quantitative analysis discussing each letter, diacritical mark, placement of the diacritical mark, and metadata collected for the corpus, such as gender, native language and other spoken languages by the authors of the texts.

Um estudo sobre o acento gráfico na aquisição da escrita: ortografia e fonologia

This paper discusses the criteria used by third and fifth graders who attend a public school, in Pelotas, RS, Brazil, regarding the function of diacritical marks in the writing system. Considering the close relationship between prosodic stress and the rules of use of diacritical marks, the study reported in this paper aimed at investigating children's hypotheses concerningthese orthographic devices. Data were collected by a controlled writing instrument, which was especially designed for this research, and by clinical interviews guided by the Piagetian method (Carraher, 1989). After completing awriting task, children were induced to explain the reasons that led them to usediacritics in their spelling. The analysis of data on their written production showed that children got the diacritical mark right, mainly in contexts in which alternation of vowel timbre could occur, that is, in medium and low medium vowels. Results of the interviews highlighted the emergence of criteria based on acoustic and graphic aspects. The analysis allowed us to define a hierarchy of acoustic criteria, i. e., vocalic timbre, vowel duration and prominence.

A sound-symbolic alternation to express cuteness and the orthographic Lyman’s Law in Japanese

The current study deals with two topics. One is the new nicknaming trend in Japanese whereby [h] alternates with [p]. In Experiment I, I established the hypothesis that the process is driven to express cuteness, and experimentally demonstrated that singleton [p] is more likely to be associated with cuteness than other consonants in Japanese. The other topic discussed in the current paper is the orthographic Lyman’s Law, or OCP(diacritic) (Kawahara, Shigeto. 2018. Phonology and orthography: The orthographic characterization of rendaku and Lyman’s Law. Glossa: a Journal of General Linguistics 3(1). 1–24.). In Experiment II, I tested whether OCP(diacritic) is psychologically real in the minds of Japanese speakers, using nicknames with [h]→[p] alternation already applied. The results showed that the naturalness of nicknames is reduced when they contain singleton [p] and voiced obstruents, both of which need a diacritical mark in hiragana and katakana. This suggests that OCP(diacritic) is active in nicknaming processes beyond rendaku and devoicing of voiced geminates. Experiment II also showed that the naturalness of nicknames is affected by other OCP effects such as OCP(C), OCP(CV), and OCP(labial). This result suggests that such OCP effects impinge on the patterns resulting from nicknaming formation.

The Unique Structure of the Pronoun "you" in Arabic Variety Associated with This Pronoun in Term of Gender and Number

This paper examines the second person pronoun in Arabic with much focus on how this pronoun can affect the antecedent; the word that the pronoun stands for. Obviously, the Arabic pronoun "you" can have various types to encode the gender and the number of the addressee. The detailed matter of this pronoun can be noticed when the person to whom we direct the talk is masculine or feminine and if this person singular, dual or plural. All these concepts have a certain rule that must be added to the noun, the verb or the preposition that follows. As a result, the listener or the reader can easily decide on the identity of the addressee in the cases of using the pronoun "you". This is because diacritical mark is used to indicate singular form of the pronoun "you" which is used in the written discourse to reflect which gender is being addressed. Furthermore, we can find diversity of suffixes at the end of such noun or verb without any change in the meaning but they change the grammar of that word according to gender and dual or plural forms. Therefore, this paper will stand on clarifying and analyzing some important points related to the unique structure of the pronoun "you".

Sicilicissitat (Plautus, Menaechmi 12) and Early Geminate Writing in Latin (with an Appendix on Men. 13)

Abstract1. The morphologically anomalous word sicilicissitat in v. 12 of Plautus' Menaechmi is, I argue, a Joycean 'portmanteau', or punning composite word coined for the nonce, meaning, simultaneously, the plot (i) 'affects a Sicilian atmosphere', from the Greek verb σικελιζειν, and (ii) 'is double' or 'counts twice', from the Latin noun sicilicus, a diacritical mark which served as a nota for gemination of consonants. 2. Although the evidence is inconclusive, I suggest that, on the strength of the pun, we can retrodate the period in which sicilici were used to the era before Ennius' arrival in Rome in 204 BC. 3. (Appendix) In Men. 13 read antēloquium, not antelogium.