Chapter 2. Orthography

This chapter examines the orthographic practices of Vat. Ar. 13, focusing on features that vary between or within the manuscript's four distinct scribal hands. Rather than treating spelling deviations from later Classical norms as evidence of phonetic or sociolinguistic "error," the chapter shows that the orthographic practices of the manuscript — including inconsistent consonantal dotting, variable spellings of the features such as the hamzah, and patterns of vocalisation — are typical of the broader landscape of early Islamic-era writing, including manuscripts treated as unproblematically Classical. The chapter argues specifically against the widespread methodological assumption that a uniform "Classical Arabic orthography" already existed in the late Umayyad and ʿAbbāsid periods against which scribal deviations can be measured; this assumption, Stokes shows, leads scholars to mischaracterise normal variation as substandard or indicative of vernacular interference. By comparing orthographic practices in Vat. Ar. 13 with contemporaneous Quranic manuscripts and papyri, the chapter demonstrates that apparent peculiarities of Christian Arabic orthography are largely unremarkable when properly contextualised, and that the differences across scribal hands within the manuscript itself are as informative as comparisons with other corpora.