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The Arabo-Tiberian Vocalisation System: An Undocumented Set of Medieval Vowel Signs for the Hebrew Script

What it is about

Besides the Tiberian, Palestinian and Babylonian vowel systems, the author identifies a fourth: an "Arabo-Tiberian" sub-variant used only for Judaeo-Arabic in ten Genizah manuscripts of the 10th–12th centuries (Bible translations, commentaries, a glossary, a calendar text). It is Tiberian pointing plus two signs borrowed from the Babylonian system: a supralinear stroke for /u/ (instead of qibbuṣ) and a pair of oblique supralinear dots for /a/, mainly in the diphthongs /ay/ and /aw/. Vowels are marked only sporadically, where they carry grammar: the first syllable of mem-prefixed participles and the pronoun suffixes -uh, -hum. With pataḥ, ḥireq, qibbuṣ and shewa standing one-to-one for Arabic fatḥa, kasra, ḍamma and sukūn, the system could transliterate Classical Arabic; the author places its birth in the "Tiberianisation" period when Babylonian and Tiberian pointing mixed, and its death in the general victory of Tiberian pointing.

Ideas

For Mova

I1 is text for 1. Script and pointing (the vowel points, Unicode). I2 is a note for the diacritics side (chapter 13, gaps); nothing to measure now, since Mova has no Hebrew vocaliser. The paper is otherwise about Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts, outside the Torah.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.24425/for.2025.157011

@inproceedings{posegay2025arabo,
  title = {{The Arabo-Tiberian Vocalisation System: An Undocumented Set of Medieval Vowel Signs for the Hebrew Script}},
  author = {Posegay, Nick},
  booktitle = {Folia Orientalia},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.24425/for.2025.157011},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.24425/for.2025.157011}
}

References

37 references, 4 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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  15. Kantor, Benjamin. 2025. ‘A Partially Vocalized Hybrid Judaeo-Arabic Glossary-Translation Fragment of Exodus 14.25–15.25; 21.7–30 from the Cairo Genizah’. Journal of Semitic Studies 70 (2): 749–807. https://doi.org/10.1093/jss/fgaf023. ↗
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