Chapter 3. Phonetics and Phonology

Building directly on the orthographic evidence examined in Chapter 2, this chapter attempts to reconstruct aspects of the phonetics and phonology of the variety or varieties of Arabic reflected in Vat. Ar. 13. The primary focus is the realisation of the glottal stop (hamzah): against the longstanding assumption that the glottal stop was stable and obligatory in Classical Arabic and that its absence in Christian Arabic manuscripts signals vernacular interference, Stokes marshals evidence from the Quranic consonantal text, the qirāʾāt, and the ʿArabiyyah tradition to show that hamzah-dropping was widespread and often prestigious in early Islamic-era Arabic. Analysis of the orthographic data across the manuscript's scribal hands reveals that the realisation of etymological glottal stops varies by phonetic context and by hand in ways that can be meaningfully related to known patterns in contemporaneous corpora, rather than being interpreted as haphazard vernacular contamination. The chapter also treats evidence for the mergers of III-Y and III-W verb roots and other phonological processes, and maintains a consistent methodological stance of preferring contextual explanations over recourse to pseudo-correction or colloquial influence.