Subject: Re: A sample from Sinai Arabic 71

From: Jean VALENTIN <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Apr 97 17:23:04 +0200

>Prophet -- singular, not plural?  Sort of a halfway house between "Isaiah
>the prophet" and "the prophets"?  Couldn't have been because someone might
>be trying to make the Muslims think Muhammed said that, could it?  Just
>curious on what influences there might have been here, or whether this was
>simply a scribal error, leaving off the final -in.

Yes, singular. It could be explained by syriac, as in that language the 
plural of the noun is expressed by a double dot that is put above the 
word. And I noticed that in the two mss of the vetus syra, this double 
dot (called seyome) is frequently omitted. 
The problem is that (1) we have no vetus syra for these verses, and (2) I 
see no other place where a variant could be explained by the misreading 
of a syriac text (there are many _common variants_ with the veteres 
syrae, but nothing that really proves a direct relation). This would be 
the first place...
Concerning the final -in, this is not correct for this word : _nabi_ has 
an "broken" plural as arabic grammatical terminology names it : the 
plural is _anbya_, graphically quite different.
I haven't either found traces of polemics with Islam in this ms. For me 
this reading remains a mystery.

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Jean Valentin - 58/7 rue Van Kalck - 1080 Bruxelles - BELGIQUE
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