The First Qu'ran

[Iyad]

Hi Scott,


No significance at all.
The diacritical signs were put in there to help those who are not "Masters" in Arabic to read the Quran correctly without making mistakes in pronounciations. In other words, My Arabic happens to be very good and I don't even notice the diacritical signs when I read the Quran...
If I find a copy that doesn't have the dicritical signs I would read it just as easy...They only compliment the original letters but do NOT change them
Here is an example of the Quranic text with the diacriticals:

إِنَّا نَحْنُ نَزَّلْنَا الذِّكْرَ وَإِنَّا لَهُ لَحَافِظُونَ

And here is the same text without the diacriticals:


إِنا نحن نزلنا الذكر وإنا له لحافظون

You can see that the original letters are the same, the small marks above or below the letter tells the reader how he/she should pronounce this letter. Arabs at the time of Muhammad (S) wouldn't know what these things are :-) but they would read their copies and it would sound and mean exactly the same thing! These signs were only invented to help people read correctly... Even now one who has a proper command of Arabic doesn't need these signs.

On another note, some people memorize the entire Quran by heart without being able to read/write at all! They recite it as they hear it form their teacher (or CD for that matter) The Quran was preserved by verbal recitation just as much if not more as it was preserved on paper.

one more thing that developed with the Arabic language was the "dotting" above or below the letters. (can't paste an example as these "dots" are now built into the Arabic letters.) If you look at the photo of the Quran in the first few posts on this thread, you'l notice that there are no "dotting" on the letters on the page displayed. you can imagine the above text in Arabic without any "dots".

It was easy for early Arabs to read that way... they were masters at their language... Nowadays and depeding on ones level, people need more help reading Arabic porperly... Actually there is another thing that's happening nowadays to make it even more easy... they are starting to write copies of the Quran and "COLOR CODE" it to signify a specific condition on a specific letter...

In all, all the advances to the Arabic language have had no affect on the Quranic text or pronounciation...

I hope this answers your quesiton.

Best,
Iyad