![]() ![]() ![]() It is a small yet sophisticated book-hand script. What follows is a detailed palaeographic description of the letters of the main text as a point of comparison for future scholarship.Īs a whole, the palaeographic style is typical of a professional Egyptian-Palestinian (“Eastern”) hand from the late eleventh to early twelfth century AD. We conducted this analysis with microscopy in visible and ultraviolet light in order to clearly see the ornamentation, stroke order, and thickness of each letter. They are smaller than the main Judaeo-Arabic text, but have a similar palaeographic style. Hebrew incipits mark the beginning of each verse. The flesh side is easily distinguished from the hair side. The lines and margins are clearly ruled, and the outside margins are pricked. All leaves originally contained 11 lines. The most complete leaf is T-S Ar.53.12, which measures 14.9 × 16.5 cm. The extant fragments comprise six single-column parchment leaves (three bifolia), containing all or part of Ecclesiastes 2:8–2:15, 2:22–3:5, 4:12–5:1, 5:8–5:15, and 11:8–12:12. Ultimately, it is a valuable witness to the adaptation of Hebrew vowel signs to Middle Arabic, and enhances our understanding of the phonetic realisation of spoken medieval Arabic in a period when vocalised manuscripts are relatively scarce. It is hoped that these elements will provide a useful guide for understanding the historical context and linguistic significance of this manuscript. Finally, the third part presents an edition and translation of the extant material, along with comments on noteworthy features from the transcription. The second then examines the vocalisation and orthography of the text, using the high concentration of vowel signs to identify both dialectal and pseudo-classical features that differ from Classical Arabic ( CA). The first describes the palaeography of the manuscript, using comparative methods to demonstrate that it was most likely written in the Egypt-Palestine area during the twelfth century. ![]() The following discussion contains three parts. The manuscript’s text spans Ecclesiastes 2:8 to 12:12, and probably represents the writer’s personal Judaeo-Arabic translation of the Hebrew original. Khan refers to T-S Ar.53.12 several times in his studies of vocalised Judaeo-Arabic, 4 but none of these fragments have been published as editions before now. ![]() I.150 has not been described in any catalogue. fragments appear in Baker and Polliack’s Arabic and Judeo-Arabic Manuscripts, but they did not notice that the pair belong together. The extant manuscript is comprised of three parchment bifolia from the Cambridge University Library’s Taylor-Schechter (T-S) and Lewis-Gibson (L-G) collections: T-S Ar.27.55 T-S Ar.53.12 and L-G Ar. 2 This paper presents a manuscript which breaks from that tendency, and offers a rare glimpse into the linguistic background of a twelfth-century Judaeo-Arabic translation of Ecclesiastes with full Tiberian vocalisation. Only a small percentage of Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts ( MS/ MSS) contain written vowel signs, and the majority of those are vocalised only sporadically. One of the challenges facing scholars of Judaeo-Arabic is the limited information available concerning the pronunciation of the medieval language, particularly with respect to vowels. ![]()
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