A few days ago, fellow YouTuber Arabic101 made a response video to my most recent YouTube video. I wanted to make this post just to address a few of the things claimed in his video, as many viewers have reached out asking for a response.
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TL;DR: It seems that many Muslims who saw my video were instilled with some doubts towards the proper pronunciation of ḍād during Qur’anic recitation. This was never my intention - I have no training and little familiarity with tajwid or related Islamic disciplines. The video was meant to highlight linguistic evidence towards an alternate pronunciation of ḍād, NOT to imply that this pronunciation should be used in religious recitation. It is perfectly possible to believe that Arabic speakers a thousand years ago may have pronounced the letter the way described in the video without implying that the Prophet pronounced it this way.
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Ok, now I’m gonna get into the weeds a bit; I invite you to watch the original video first.
Regarding Arabic being called the “language of ḍād,” Arabic101 makes a large point about ḍād not being the rarest sound, and how the epithet “language of ḍād” does not imply as such. I agree - but that’s the point of the video! I was trying to correct the notion that many Arabic speakers have regarding that sound. For example, I made a video over a year ago going over all the Arabic sounds in MSA, and one of the top comments claims “Fun fact: the letter ض (Dhad) /d?/ doesn't exist in any other language, that's why some people nickname Arabic language as "لغة الضاد" (The language of Dhad).” Similar comments with thousands of likes can be found in the TikTok video I made on the same subject. Many Arabic speakers reiterate the myth of “language of ḍād” implying ḍād only exists in Arabic, and I thought it would serve as a nice hook. Also, when I called ḍād the rarest sound, I meant rare in a cross-linguistic sense, as in the sound is rare across the world's languages, not that the sound is rarely found within the Arabic language. Funnily enough, the letter ظ is both rarer cross-linguistically and within Arabic. And yet, the myth about the “language of ḍād” persists.
The next point is on the classification of Standard Arabic. Arabic101 claims that Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic (the language of the Qur’an) are the same, but this is incorrect. Though they are very similar, especially grammatically, there are many differences, including in pronunciation. I won’t go into detail here, but I encourage you to look into it. So, when I say that ḍād is a plosive in “Modern Arabic,” I am not claiming it is a plosive in Classical Arabic.
Then, there’s a lot of discussion on the proper pronunciation according to Qur’anic recitation. This, I think, is the crux of the disagreement - the proposed pronunciation I give is not intended to supplant the one as used by modern Muslim scholars. For those who are unfamiliar, tajwid is the Islamic science of learning how to recite the Qur’an as it was pronounced by the Prophet. By no means do I, a non-Muslim with no training in tajwid, claim to reject or cast doubt on proper Qur’anic recitation. We know that dialectal variation of Arabic existed all across the peninsula well before the time of the Prophet. It is not unreasonable to think - in fact, it is by many experts believed - that the proper Arabic of Qur’anic recitation differs from much of the spoken Arabic at the time. The fact that jim is a moon letter despite phonetically resembling the sun letters, for example, suggests that the Prophet’s pronunciation of the letter was different than many other speakers’. Moreover, much of the Arabic loanwords mentioned in my video (evidence which Arabic101 conveniently neglects to mention) were almost certainly spread by lay Arabic speaking peoples, not learned through Qur’anic recitation.
There are a few other minor points in there, but largely I don’t think it’s worth belaboring them. Arabic101 makes the point that I claim ḍād may have been pronounced like a “y,” which is not really what I said/meant there, but I didn't make my point very clearly and should’ve phrased it better. He also talks about how my “strongest evidence,” the fact that the rare sound exists in an extant dialect, doesn’t necessarily imply an ancient pronunciation retained, but could also refer to a novel, innovative pronunciation. Though there is good reason to think that this is indeed an ancient pronunciation retained (check out the source from which this information came from for more), he is absolutely right that it could be an innovation.
As a final point, I wanna address something that Arabic101 didn’t say, but that many of the comments did. That being, that my perspective of ḍād’s pronunciation is a largely “orientalist” point of view that ignores evidence and Islamic science. The truth is, this perspective on ḍād’s pronunciation is believed by a number of both western and eastern scholars. It is based on plenty of evidence that I plainly provided in the description of the original video, and in no way diminishes the Qur’anic realization.
Ok, that’s about it; I hope this addresses most people’s concerns!
EDIT: It's also come to my attention that Arabic101 has previously spread some misinformation regarding Arabic. If you go to his channel for tajwid so be it, but I'd avoid any linguistic insights.
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