Judeo-Arabic Orthographies: Insights from a Fifteenth-Century Šarḥ

Judeo-Arabic is a religiolect that developed as a result of the great Arab-Islamic conquests during the 7th century. This linguistic variety shares some of those features common to Neoarabic dialects; nonetheless, it preserves its own uniqueness, such as the almost absolute use of Hebrew characters and the occurrence of Hebrew and Aramaic lexical and grammatical elements within the texts. The writing system of Judeo-Arabic was affected by the socio-political changes that occurred during its development. In particular, Judeo-Arabic was subjected to a dramatic change during the 15th century, as a result of the increasing isolation of the Jews. In this period the so-called ‘Hebraized’ orthography became more prevalent and turned out to be representative of the šurūḥ, i.e. Judeo-Arabic translations of Hebrew sacred texts. In this contribution, we will focus on the issue of Judeo-Arabic graphic adaptation, through the linguistic analysis of an unpublished manuscript from the 15th century containing a šarḥ. Peculiarities and potential inconsistencies are discussed according to the wider and renowned Judeo-Arabic orthographic classification.