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

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).