A scribal name error proves a Latin-script original preceded the Arabic version

Evidence

Temimi is judging this Morisco manuscript by standards he would apply in dealing with texts printed and edited by himself in modern times. To reach a fair comparative evaluation of copies executed by Morisco copyists, one ought to compare like with like. One should compare Morisco books with the productions of rural scribes at this time in other Islamic lands where Arabic was not the vernacular. In addition, al-Andalus did have some spelling conventions of its own, and departures from oriental norms that now have become standard throughout the Arab world may actually not arise from ignorance. Most important, it is necessary to bear in mind that the base text on which the Morisco copyist was working almost certainly did not correspond to whatever we may have available for comparison as a modern standard edition. The sort of relatively free treatment of the copy text that Temimi condemns was, I suspect, widespread at this time (not only in Islamic Spain, but elsewhere in the Islamic world, and not only in the Islamic world, for much the same sort of thing would have been going on in Christian Europe). — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 696 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Bib, we know, was how the word was often actually pronounced in Valencia (as a consequence of a process of vowel closure, termed imala in Arabic treatises of phonetics, that was a characteristic of the Andalusi dialects). Bib was what people actually said, there is no doubt about that, but nobody before the sixteenth century would consistently write the word that way. (A useful parallel might be that in North America the English word “water” is pronounced with some kind of voiced or attenuated dental medial consonant, but nobody there would ever dream of actually writing that word with a d: “wader.”) In some regions where Hispano-Arabic vernaculars existed (in Valencia above all) we witness the emergence of what we may perhaps call “written vernacular texts” in which divergences from the old norms are not occasional slips and errors but are apparently intentional. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 610 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Unpointed Arabic script makes single consonant outlines ambiguous across five readings — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1263; The Sacromonte forgers’ almost undotted Arabic script made readings exponentially ambiguous — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1760; Morisco scribal errors may reflect local conventions, not ignorance — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 696 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Morisco scribal errors may reflect local conventions, not ignorance #complicates (0.82) — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 696
• Sixteenth-century Valencian Arabic produced deliberate written vernacular spellings, not mere errors #complicates (0.76) — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 610