Motke: The Arabic letter غ and is it مغارة or معارة?

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Nov 7, 2018 at 06:56

This is just an addendum:

> > e.g., Arabic's مغارة is Hebrew's معرة
>
> Cave in Syriac is ܡܥܰܪܬܳܐ or Ma'rta same as
> Hebrew

The Qur'an talks about مغارات (it sounds very much like the Syriac word for cave in the singular) which is read by al-Tabari as plural of مغارة or Cave.

However, the alphabet formula in both Syriac and Arabic is what is called: ابجد هوز حطي كلمن سعفص قرشت which represents the 22 letters of the alphabet in Syriac. And yes the Muslim grammarians add "ثخذ وضظغ" in-order to include Arabic letters not in the above Abgad formula. Notice that the Arabic letter غ is the last letter

We know that al-Tabari was dealing with a copy of the Qur'an that was written in Rasm only or the consonantal text with no dots or short vowels and also missing long vowels (as in al-Rahman in the Basmalla). This means that the letter ع in the rasm can be read as either ع or غ and remember that the earliest Muslim grammarians were not Arabs or Semites. This makes one wonder that it could very well have been معارات (not unlike the word in Syriac) and not, as was read by the non Arab al-Tabari as مغارات

BTW the Arabic letter Ta marbouta or ة indicates that the word is feminine and it is silent However, it is vocalized as T if the following word includes the Arabic definite article ال so a Maktaba (library) becomes Maktabat el-Balad (notice the t at the end of Maktabat which is the Ta marbouta or ة)

Thanks for a very stimulating discussion

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