English
Język Polski
The Arabo-Tiberian Vocalisation System: An Undocumented Set of Medieval Vowel Signs for the Hebrew Script
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24425/for.2025.157011Abstract
The three main Hebrew vocalisation systems—Tiberian, Palestinian, and Babylonian—are well-known in the history of Semitic languages. This article describes another previously undocumented Hebrew vocalisation system, the ‘Arabo-Tiberian system’, a sub-variant of the Tiberian system that appears only in Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts around the tenthand eleventh centuries. In addition to the typical Tiberian vowel marks, the Arabo-Tiberian system includes two loaned Babylonian signs, one for the vowel /u/ and another for /a/ (primarily in the diphthongs /aw/ and /ay/). This system never achieved the widespread adoption or standardisation of other Hebrew and Arabic vowel systems, so it survives now only in fragmentary evidence from the Cairo Genizah. This article describes the common Arabo-Tiberian features in ten vocalised manuscripts and offers hypotheses for the system’s origin and extinction.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Folia Orientalia
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Copyright on any open access article in the Folia Orientalia journal published by Polish Academy of Sciences is retained by the author(s). Authors grant Polish Academy of Sciences a license to publish the article and identify itself as the original publisher. Authors also grant any user the right to use the article freely if its integrity is maintained and its original authors, citation details and publisher are identified. The Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 formalizes these and other terms and conditions of publishing articles.
The editorial team of Folia Orientalia implements an open access policy by publishing materials in the form of the so-called Gold Open Access and encourages authors to place articles published in the journal in open repositories (after the review or the final version of the publisher), provided that a link to the journal’s website is provided.
Exceptions to copyright policy
For the articles which were previously published, before year 2020, policies that are different from the above. In all such, access to these articles is free from fees or any other access restrictions. Permissions for the use of the texts published in that journal may be sought directly from the editorial team of Folia Orientalia, by e-mail: folia.orientalia@uj.edu.pl.
