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Morphological Analysis of the

Qur’an
Judith Dror, Dudu Shaharabani, Rafi Talmon, Shuly Wintner
University of Haifa, Israel

Abstract
We present a computational system for morphological analysis and annotation
of the Qur’an, for research and teaching purposes. The system facilitates a
variety of queries on the Qur’anic text that make reference not only to the words,
but also to their linguistic attributes. The core of the system is a set of finite-state
based rules which describe the morpho-phonological and morpho-syntactic
phenomena of the Qur’anic language. Using a finite-state toolbox we apply the
rules to the Qur’anic text and obtain full morphological analysis of its words.
The results of the analysis are stored in an efficient database and are accessed
through a graphical user interface which facilitates the presentation of complex
queries. The system is currently being used for teaching and research purposes;
we exemplify its usefulness for investigating several morphological, syntactic,
semantic, and stylistic aspects of the Qur’anic text.

1 Introduction
We present a system for morphological analysis and annotation of the
Qur’an, for research and teaching purposes. It provides a tool by which
queries can be made which enable search of intricate syntactic (but also,
to some extent, semantic and stylistic) relations in the Qur’an. The
system is currently being used for teaching and research purposes; we
Correspondence: exemplify its usefulness for investigating several morphological, syntactic,
Shuly Wintner, semantic, and stylistic aspects of the Qur’anic text.
Department of Computer Science,
The importance of this text in the history of the Arabic language and
University of Haifa,
Mount Carmel, Islamic civilization needs no introduction. The Qur’an has the advantage
31905 Haifa, of being a closed corpus in the following senses: First, it demonstrates a
Israel. frequent repetition of structures, indeed of the same phrases, to the
Email addresses: extent of what may be considered formulaic style. Second, the Qur’an is
[email protected]
traditionally identified with one person, a specific region, and a certain
1 Of course, there is no
period of time, and its volume is relatively restricted.1 These two facts
communis opinio about this justify treatment of the Qur’an as an independent corpus which deserves
tri-partite identification. an independent study of its language in general and syntax in particular
Contradictory theories are (Talmon, 2001).
discussed, which deny it partly The system we describe provides means for presenting a variety of
or even as a whole. queries on the Qur’anic text that make reference not only to the words

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Judith Dror et al.

but also to their linguistic attributes. Thus, users are able to extract from
the text certain words or word patterns, using features of the words (such
as root, pattern, lexeme, gender, number, dependent pronouns, tense,
aspect, etc.) or combinations of words which conform to a particular
structure (such as a nominative noun followed immediately by a finite
verb). This capability enables the linguist to access complex information
that is unavailable in ordinary dictionaries, thesauri, or concordances.
Such information can be used for teaching and research purposes; it
facilitates linguistic and literary analyses of the Qur’anic text, and is
instrumental in exploring aspects of its syntax, semantics, and style.
The core of the system consists in morphological analysis of the text.
This is done automatically, using a finite-state based toolbox. The major
task here is the stipulation of the morphophonemic and morpho-
graphemic rules of the corpus. The product of this phase is a database of
morphological analyses associated with each word token in the corpus.
On top of the database, a graphical user interface was implemented
which enables users to access the database of the annotated Qur’an,
present queries, and collect information in a structured manner.
The contribution of this work is manifold:
● The system enables both scholars and students to upgrade their
linguistic tools in the study of the structure of Classical Arabic and its
leading literary texts.
● The model is applicable for computerized study of other corpora,
in fact of the whole Classical Arabic literature (we are currently
applying it to a medium-sized corpus of Classical Arabic poetry, see
section 5).
● The methodology we developed is in principle applicable for other,
similar tasks. While the morpho-phonological rules are characteristic
of Classical Arabic, at times even specific to the corpus we used, the
same methodology can be used for investigating linguistic and literary
aspects of other corpora.
● The grammatically annotated Qur’an facilitates study of other language
aspects of this text, especially its style.
In the next section we discuss the motivation for this research and
relate it to existing works. Section 3 describes the details of the system,
and some results of its usage are listed in section 4. We conclude with
suggestions for further research.

2 Motivation
2.1 Challenges
Any linguistic or literary investigation of texts can benefit from computa-
tional technology. Evidently, the use of computational dictionaries, con-
cordances, and indexes, augmented by sophisticated searching tools, can
be extremely useful for scholars who are interested in such investigations.
However, for languages with productive morphology such technology is
usually insufficient. Dictionaries and concordances are indexed by lemma,

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whereas in a language such as Arabic a given lemma can be inflected in

dozens, sometimes hundreds of different forms.
As an example, consider the noun diin ‘religion’ (we refer to matters
of transcribing Arabic presently). It occurs as diin-u in the nominative
case, diin-a in the accusative and diin-i in the genitive. Each of these
forms can be optionally extended by the indefinite marker n. Adding to
the confusion is the fact that nouns can combine with dependent pro-
nominal suffixes, such as -i for the first person singular one. Thus, the
form diin-i is ambiguous as to whether the -i suffix is a case marker or a
dependent pronoun.
Verbs are even more complicated. There are twelve major verbal
stems in Classical Arabic, each with its inflectional paradigm. Verbs
inflect for person, number, gender, tense/aspect, and mood and can
additionally be associated with object clitics. For example, the verb ’akala
‘eat, third person singular masculine perfect active’ also occurs as ’akaluu
(plural) or ya’kul (imperfect); or as ’akala-hu (with an attached pro-
nominal clitic indicating the direct object of the verb).
On top of the morphological wealth of the language, traditional
Arabic script dictates that certain particles, which in some languages are
independent morphemes, attach to the words which immediately follow
them. Such is the case with the definite article, the coordinating con-
junction, many of the prepositions, etc. Sequences of two, three, and even
four particles can combine with a single word, and the number of
different prefix sequences is in the hundreds. Since these particles can in
most cases also be analyzed as parts of lemmas, the orthography adds yet
another dimension of ambiguity to the problem of analyzing Arabic
words.
For example, each of the inflected forms of diin discussed above can be
preceded by the definite article l-; the conjunction wa- ‘and’; or the
prepositions bi- ‘in’ or li- ‘to’. Combinations of the prefix particles are
also allowed, such as bi-l-diin-i ‘in the religion’ or wa-li-l-diin-i ‘and to
the religion’. Verbs, too, can be preceded by particles such as wa, fa or fal
(conjunctions), la (an affirmative particle) or the prepositions bi-, li-
or ka-.
Thus, a simple search engine which uses the lemma to index word
forms may fail to recognize several of the inflected and derived forms of
the lemma in the text. More sophistication is required in order to provide
appropriate search tools: in other words, full morphological analysis of
the text is inevitable if one is interested in accurate results.

2.2 Related work

Automatic morphological analysis of Arabic is not new; several such
systems exist (Beesley, 1996; Beesley, 1998a; Beesley, 2001; Kiraz, 1998;
Kiraz, 2000; Al-Shalabi and Evens, 1998; Berri et al., 2001; Darwish, 2002).
A major drawback of some systems is limited coverage; for example
Al-Shalabi and Evens (1998) only deal with verbs and deverbal forms.
Berri et al. describe a system which does not use a lexicon; as the
implementation of the system is reported to be ‘underway’, and no

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Judith Dror et al.

examples of output are given, it is hard to assess its coverage. Darwish

(2002) decidedly aims at producing only the root of the word as the result
of the analysis; and he does so using automatically acquired rules and
statistical measures. In contrast, our system is capable of providing full
coverage of the corpus it is designed for, and extensions of the system to
larger corpora is only a matter of extending the lexicon, as the system
implements linguistically motivated rules.
Similarly to works of Beesley and Kiraz mentioned above, but in
contrast to other systems, our system is based on linguistic rules. This is
advantageous both on theoretical and on practical grounds. First, the
design of the rules results in additional linguistic insights, as noted above.
Second, rule-based systems are very easy to extend, maintain, and modify.
Finally, the reliance on finite-state technology guarantees extremely
efficient processing. In our case, the entire corpus of some 80,000 words
is analyzed in less than 20 seconds on stock hardware.
However, the major inadequacy of existing systems for our purposes
stems from the fact that most of them deal with Modern Standard Arabic
(MSA); the language of the Qur’an is Classical Arabic. In many respects it
is unique, and its lexicon, morphology, and syntax require dedicated
attention.2 As Berg (2001) notes, ‘Except for isolated efforts . . . , little has
been done with computer-assisted analysis of the text . . . Thus, for the
present, computer-assisted analysis of the Qur’an remains an intriguing
but unexplored field.’ The work we report on here is one step towards
exploring this field.

2.3 Characteristics of the transcription

Most systems for processing Arabic use the standard Arabic script, or a
one-to-one transliteration thereof, as their input script. Our system, in
contrast, uses a phonemic transcription of the text, in which some of the 2 Classical Arabic is a major
fundament of MSA. Both are
morphological and orthographic ambiguity is reduced. The transcription
identified as one register,
is based on pure ASCII notations, largely with single-symbol equivalents
termed fuSHaa, by native
of the Arabic graphemes, and double letters expressing long vowels. The speakers of Arabic (who use
conventions of the Arabic orthography are basically retained, e.g., one- both for cultural purposes,
letter particles which are prefixed to the noun or verb are hyphenated to not for daily
the following word (wa-kaana ‘and was’), as are pronominal and communication). But MSA is
case/mood suffixes (yas’al-u-nii ‘he will ask-indicative-me’). In general, comprised also of several
hyphenation serves to isolate noun bases from the various (inflectional other layers of Arabic, such as
and derivational) affixes. This process is sometimes inapplicable for influence of the modern
Arabic verbal forms, whose complexity calls for creation of a detailed set dialects, influence of foreign
of derivation rules instead. (mainly Western) languages,
and Middle Arabic. See, e.g.,
As an example of the transcription, Fig. 1 lists the seven verses of the
the delailed discussion in Blau
first suura. More details are given in the Appendix.
(1973), Blau (1976), mainly
The use of a phonemic script facilitates a simpler, clearer stipulation of for the domain of syntax. It is
morphological rules. It also helps to reduce the degree of ambiguity in noteworthy that some
certain cases. Since our transcription is more informative than the scholars (notably W. Fischer)
standard script, it is possible to deterministically convert the former to consider Qur’anic Arabic as
the latter; see section 3.3. pre-classical, see summary in
Talmon, 2001, p. 346.

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Morphological Analysis of the Qur’an

1. bi-sm-i llaah-i l-raHmaan-i l-raHiim-i

2. l-Hamd-u li-llaah-i rabb-i l-&aalam-iina
3. l-raHmaan-i l-raHiim-i
4. maalik-i yawm-i l-diin-i
5. ’iyyaa-ka na&bud-u wa-’iyyaa-ka nasta&iin-u
6. hdi-naa l-SiraaT-a l-mustaqiim-a
Fig. 1 Example of the Arabic
transcription: suurat-u l- 7. SiraaT-a lla(dh)iina ‘an&amta &alay-him gayr-i l-magDuub-i
faatiHat-i. &alay-him wa-laa l-Daall-iina

3 Description of the System

In order to perform full morphological analysis one needs a complete
lexicon and a complete stipulation of the morphological rules of the
language at hand. We use a finite-state based toolbox (LEXC/XFST,
Beesley and Karttunen (2003)) which facilitates the stipulation of the
lexicon and the rules. This information is then compiled into finite-state
transducers which constitute the morphological analyzer.
The use of the toolbox enabled us to avoid the bottleneck of having to
annotate the corpus manually. Furthermore, using a finite-state toolbox
such as XFST (as opposed to implementing a dedicated morphological
analyzer from scratch) has three additional advantages: first, the morpho-
logical analyzer is not a ‘black box’ which outputs analyses when given
a string. Rather, the rules which constitute the system make sense
linguistically. The mere process of designing the rules yields new insights
concerning the morpho-phonology of the language. Maintaining such a
system is a relatively easy task, as the rules are available in a human-
readable form. Second, as finite-state networks are inherently reversible,
the system can be used both for analysis and for generation. The
generation mode was extremely useful when the system was debugged: it
enabled us to generate both arbitrary and manually crafted inflected
forms, and test their plausibility. Finally, as XFST compiles its rules into
finite-state networks, we can benefit from the computational efficiency of
such systems, where analysis of a string takes time linear in the length of
the string (Karttunen et al., 1996).
In this setup, the main tasks of the computational linguist are the
design and implementation of the lexicon; and the stipulation of
morphological rules. This section describes the lexicon, the set of rules,
and a few additional programs that are used by the system.

3.1 Lexicon
We divided the lexicon of the Qur’an into three classes: closed-class
words (including prepositions, pronouns, particles, conjunctions,
adverbials, etc.); nominal bases; and verbal bases. We describe each of
these classes below.
Using a concordance (Abd al-Baaqii, 1987), we manually constructed
a full list of the closed-class words (a few hundred occur in the Qur’an).
Closed-class words are lexical items such as pronouns (personal, demon-

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strative, relative, and interrogative), prepositions, and particles. Examples

include the pronouns hum (‘they’) or naHnu (‘we’), the prepositions
&alaa (‘on’) or min (‘from’) and particles such as ’iyyaa (the accusative
marker, denoted Acc). Note, however, that in Arabic such words inflect
and can combine with other particles, so the lexicon accounts also
for inflected forms such as &alay-him (‘on3pPlMasc’) or ’iyyaa-ka
(‘Acc2pSgMasc’). Furthermore, certain particles are combined to words
as prefixes, such as the conjunction wa- (‘and’): wa-naHnu (‘and-we’).
The lexicon handles such cases by means of systematic rules which
generate the inflected (and derived) forms from the basic word list. Some
phenomena, however, such as phonetic rules which might apply, are
dealt with by subsequent stages of processing; see section 3.2.
We also used the concordance to construct a complete list of all the
nominal bases which occur in the corpus (approximately twenty-five
hundred). The lexicon of noun bases is more complex; interesting
phenomena include differences in the feminine and plural inflections,
including the broken plural, and proper names. We solve the problems
using brute-force encoding of the irregular forms in the lexicon. Again,
since we are mostly concerned with a closed corpus here, this is a
reasonable solution. It is worth mentioning that such phenomena can
be handled by finite-state machinery (Beesley, 1998b; Beesley and
Karttunen, 2000), but in our case such solutions were unnecessary.
The lexicon associates with each lexeme its root and pattern. The
format of each entry consists of three parts: a lexical string, which
typically consists of the root and pattern information, but sometimes
contains more information, especially for the idiosyncratic forms; a
surface form, which is the actual representation of the lexeme in our
script; and a continuation class, which tersely specifies which suffixes the
lexeme can combine with. The format, in the syntax of the LEXC finite-
state toolbox, is:
lexical_string:surface_form continuation_class
We use the ‘’ symbol in lexical strings to separate morphemes and tags
of the analysis from each other. For example, consider the following
lexical entries:
swr+fu&lat:suurat NounEndingFem;
Hmd+fa&l:Hamd NounEnding;
’insaan=nws+fa&l:naas PluralNounEnding;
The first specifies that suurat (‘Qur’an chapter’) is a noun whose root is
s.w.r and whose pattern is fu&lat. Furthermore, the continuation class
NounEndingFem indicates that the lexeme can be suffixed by feminine
nominal affixes. The second entry indicates that Hamd (‘praise’) is a
regular (masculine) noun whose root is H.m.d and whose pattern is fa&l.
The last example refers to naas (‘men’) and stipulates, in addition to the
root n.w.s and the pattern fa&l, also the singular form ’insaan ‘man’. The
continuation class here indicates that naas can combine with plural
nominal suffixes.

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As was the case with the previous class, certain aspects of noun inflec-
tion, such as concatenation of particles (prefixes), gender, number, and
case morphemes and dependent pronouns (suffixes), as well as definite
and indefinite markers, are handled in the lexicon. Subsequent process-
ing handles morpho-phonemic alternations. For example, all nouns can
be suffixed by -ii to indicate a first-person singular dependent pronoun
(e.g., &aduww-ii ‘my enemy’). The lexicon will add such suffixes to all
regular nouns, including bu(sh)raa ‘good news’. Only further processing
will correct the resulting form to bu(sh)raa-ya (‘good news1pSg’).
As another example, the lexicon generates all the combinations of
nouns with the definite article l-, which is a prefix, and with the indefinite
marker n, which is a suffix. This means that ungrammatical forms such as
*l-naas-un are generated by the lexicon and will have to be pruned by the
rules.
The verbs lexicon is the most complicated. While it was possible to
manually construct a list of all noun bases occurring in the corpus, such a
task would have been far more complex for the verbs. However, a list of
the verbal roots and stems occurring in the Qur’an (including perfect/
imperfect base variations in Stem 1) is available (Chouémi, 1966; Ambros,
1987); we automatically generated all possible instantiations of these
roots in all the verbal patterns of Qur’anic Arabic. Of course, this leads to
vast over-generation: our lists contain approximately 1,000 roots and
almost 100 verbal patterns. Of the 100,000 possible verb bases, only a
small percentage is actually realized in Arabic. Furthermore, following
the practice of noun bases and closed group words, we also generate all
possible inflections of the verbal bases in the lexicon (again, deferring
morpho-phonological alternation to subsequent processing). In theory,
such over-generation could have led to unbearable morphological
ambiguity; our experience, however, shows that this is not the case. As
our objective here is limited to analysis of the Qur’anic text only, we were
not obliged to consider word forms which do not occur in the Qur’an.
Intersecting the huge number of inflected forms with the corpus, most of
the artificial forms disappear and the remaining ones contribute only
mildly to the degree of ambiguity.
Finally, it is important to note that the lexicon does not only generate
surface forms; it also associates with each surface form a lexical string
which lists information about the form’s morphemes and morphological
tags. The following example lists pairs of surface forms and their
associated lexical strings as generated by the lexicon (and before any of
the rules were applied):
l-naas-u Def+’insaan=nws+fa&l+Noun+Triptotic+Masc+
BrokenPl+Nom
l-naas-un Def+’insaan=nws+fa&l+Noun+Triptotic+Masc+
BrokenPl+Nom+Tanwiin
fa-’akalaa fa+Particle+Conjunction+’kl+Verb+Stem1+
Perf+Act+3P+Dual+Masc
fii-hum fii+Prep+Pron+Dependent+3P+Pl+Masc

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Note that the second example above is ungrammatical due to the

occurrences of both the definite article and the indefinite marker; the last
example is also ungrammatical, as a vowel harmony rule dictates that the
dependent pronoun hum be realized as him when attached to a word
ending in ii, i or y. These problems are corrected by the rule component.

3.2 Finite-state rules

As noted above, the lexicon generates base forms, with additional affixed
morphemes that represent particles such as the conjunction wa-
(‘and’), the definite article l- or the preposition bi- (‘in’), morphological
information pertaining to number, gender, case, etc. such as the suffix -u
‘Nominative’, dependent pronouns such as the suffix -ka
(‘2pSgMasc’) etc. However, such affixes are simply concatenated to the
bases they attach to, and morpho-phonological alternations are deferred
to this stage of processing. Furthermore, the verb bases that are generated
in the lexicon ignore completely the peculiarities of the weak paradigms.
The rule component of the system has four tasks: to filter out redund-
ancies of the lexicon; to handle morpho-phonological alternations; to
take care of idiosyncrasies, such as the verbal weak paradigms; and to
implement purely phonetic rules. We exemplify each of these below.
As an example of redundancies in the lexicon, consider the prepo-
sitions li- (‘to’) and ka- (‘as’). These prepositions can only attach to
nouns in the genitive case. However, the lexicon will wrongly generate
strings in which these prepositions combine with nominative or
accusative nouns. A simple finite-state rule filters out analyses which
contain both the preposition li- or ka- and a noun in accusative or
nominative case. The examples below use the syntax of the XFST finite-
state tool; while it is impossible to detail the syntax and semantics of the
XFST language here, we note in passing that ‘~?*’ denotes the empty set;
‘<-’ is a replace rule, and the example below states that whenever a
pattern which is captured by whatever is to the right of the ‘<-’ is
matched, it is replaced by the empty set (in other words, filtered out).
The pattern to the right of the arrow matches occurrences of the l
or k prepositions (‘|’ denotes union) when they are in the context of
the beginning of a word (denoted by ‘.#.’) on the left and either the tag
‘+Acc’ or the tag ‘+Nom’ on the right. The ‘_’ separates the left context
from the right context. Ignore the ‘%’ symbols which are an XFST
technicality.
~?* <- [l %+Prep | k %+Prep] \/
[.#.] _ [?* [%+Acc | %+Nom]];

In general, replace rules have five components: a pattern to be matched; a

pattern for replacing it; a type of replacement; and, optionally, left and
right contexts which constrain the replacement. As another example, a
simple rule filters out analyses which contain both the definite article and
an indefinite marker (tanwiin):
~?* <- %+Noun \/ [Def%+ ?*] _ [?* %+Tanwiin];

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Other rules of this kind filter out analyses of diptotic nouns whose
pattern is fa&laa’ or ’af&al in the genitive case when they are not definite;
or, similarly, indefinite tri-syllabic broken plurals in the genitive case.
As an example of a morpho-phonological alternation rule, consider
the suffix -uuna (‘Rectus’). When added to a noun which ends in aa,
the long vowel is shortened and the suffix is contracted, so that
l-’a&laa+uuna (‘the supreme ones’) becomes l-’a&l-awna. Similarly, the
obliquus suffix iina is contracted to ayna. These phenomena are easily
handled with finite-state rules:
[aa %- uu n a] -> [%- a w n a];
[a y %- uu n a] -> [%- a w n a];
[aa %- ii n a] -> [%- a y n a];
[a y %- ii n a] -> [%- a y n a];

Here, the format of the rule is simpler, as the replacement is

unconditional (i.e. not constrained by the context). For example, any
occurrence of the pattern aa - uu n a, wrongly generated in the lexicon, is
replaced by the pattern - a w n a. Assimilation phenomena in the verb are
handled similarly:
t a -> s || [%+Stem5 | %+Stem6 ] _ [s ];
z t -> z d || [%+Stem8] _ ;

In addition, certain rules handle idiosyncrasies such as ‘frozen’ nouns

which are not marked for case, etc. More interesting is the treatment of
the weak verb paradigms. Most of the rules in the system are dedicated to
weak verbs, handling phenomena such as breaking a tri-consonantal
cluster with a vowel in the context of geminite roots: R1R2V1R2V2
R1V1R2R2V2; or the omission of the w in prima-w roots, as well as the
other phenomena associated with this paradigm; etc.
Finally, finite-state rules also handle pure phonetic rules. For example,
such a rule implements a vowel harmony phenomenon which changes
the u vowel of the dependent pronouns -hu, -hum, -humaa and -hunna
(‘him, them-PlMasc, them-Dual, them-PlFem’, respectively) to i when
attached to words ending in i or y:
[%- h u m] -> [%- h i m] || [ii | i | y] _ [%- | .#.];
[%- h u m aa] -> [%- h i m aa] ||
[ii | i | y] _ [%- | .#.];
[%- h u n n a] -> [%- h i n n a] ||
[ii | i | y] _ [%- | .#.];
[%- h u] -> [%- h i] || [ii | i | y] _ [%- | .#.];

3.3 A computational morphological analyzer

Once the lexicon and the finite-state rules have been finalized, we used an
existing finite-state toolbox (Beesley and Karttunen, 2003) to compile

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suurat-u swr+fu&lat+Noun+Triptotic+Fem+Sg+Nom
l-faatiHat-i Def+ftH+Verb+Triptotic+Stem1+ActPart+Fem+Sg+Gen
bi-sm-i b+Prep+sm+Noun+Triptotic+Masc+Sg+Gen
llaah-i Def+llaah+ProperName+Gen
l-raHmaan-i Def+rHm+fa&laan+Noun+Triptotic+Adjective+Masc+Sg+Gen
l-raHiim-i Def+rHm+fa&iil+Noun+Triptotic+Adjective+Masc+Sg+Gen
l-Hamd-u Def+Hmd+fa&l+Noun+Triptotic+Masc+Sg+Nom
li-llaah-i l+Prep+Def+llaah+ProperName+Gen
rabb-i rbb+fa&l+Noun+Triptotic+Masc+Sg+Pron+Dependent+1P+Sg
rabb-i rbb+fa&l+Noun+Triptotic+Masc+Sg+Gen
l-&aalam-iina Def+&lm+faa&al+Noun+Triptotic+Masc+Pl+Obliquus
l-raHmaan-i Def+rHm+fa&laan+Noun+Triptotic+Adjective+Masc+Sg+Gen
l-raHiim-i Def+rHm+fa&iil+Noun+Triptotic+Adjective+Masc+Sg+Gen
maalik-i mlk+Verb+Triptotic+Stem1+ActPart+Masc+Sg+Gen
yawm-i ywm+fa&l+Noun+Triptotic+Masc+Sg+Gen
l-diin-i Def+dyn+fi&l+Noun+Triptotic+Masc+Sg+Gen
’iyyaa-ka ‘iyyaa+Particle+Pron+Dependent+2P+Sg+Masc
na&bud-u &bd+Verb+Stem1+Imp+Act+1P+Pl+Masc/Fem+NonEnergicus+Indic
wa-’iyyaa-ka wa+Particle+Conjunction+’iyyaa+Particle+Pron+Dependent+2P+Sg+Masc
nasta&iin-u &wn+Verb+Stem10+Imp+Act+1P+Pl+Masc/Fem+NonEnergicus+Indic
nasta&iin-u &yn+Verb+Stem10+Imp+Act+1P+Pl+Masc/Fem+NonEnergicus+Indic
hdi-naa hdy+Verb+Stem1+Imperative+2P+Sg+Masc+NonEnergicus+Pron+Dependent+1P+Pl
l-SiraaT-a Def+SrT+fi&aal+Noun+Triptotic+Masc+Sg+Acc
l-mustaqiim-a Def+qwm+Verb+Triptotic+Stem10+ActPart+Masc+Sg+Acc

Fig. 2 Example analyses.

them to finite-state networks, implementing a full morphological ana-

lyzer of the corpus. Examples of analyses are provided in Fig. 2.
Furthermore, we have implemented a finite-state transducer for
converting our transcription to the standard Arabic script (represented
in Unicode). While it is not incorporated into the graphical user interface
(see below), this transducer provides an efficient conversion of the
analysis results to the standard script, while the internals of the system
can still be implemented using our phonemic transcription. Users who
prefer to use the standard script can thus search the morphologically
analyzed Qur’an in the traditional way (albeit without the aid of the
graphical user interface).
The Qur’an consists of approximately 80,000 word forms (tokens).
Our morphological analyzer is now capable of producing analyses for all
of them (full coverage). Evidently, our system is currently incapable of
performing (context-dependent) morphological disambiguation, and
sometimes the number of analyses per word can be rather high, especially
in the verb, as is the case with nasta&iin-u, which is assigned two
analyses here (but see section 5 below). However, the average number of
analyses per word token in our corpus is only 1.37, and most of the
tokens (70%) are assigned a unique analysis.
The results of the analysis are stored in a database in a form that

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encodes, for each analyzed word, its morphological features and their
values. For example, an analysis such as:
swr+fu&lat+Noun+Triptotic+Fem+Sg+Nom

is converted to a record structure of the form:

root swr
pattern fu&lat
part of speech Noun
case marking triptotic
gender Fem
number Sg
case Nom
We use a small program to parse the analyses and add the records to the
database (we use MySQL (DuBois, 1999) for database management). The
database provides an efficient means for searching the analyzed corpus by
a variety of keys, including the surface word, its root, its pattern, but also
key features such as part of speech, etc. This facilitates complex queries as
described below.
To demonstrate the efficiency of finite-state technology in general,
and the Xerox tools (LEXC and XFST) we used in particular, for large-
scale morphological analysis, we provide here some technical data
regarding the system. The corpus we deal with contains some 80,000
word tokens. The lexicon, expressed in LEXC, contains approximately
2,500 noun forms and 100,000 verb bases, in addition to closed-class
words. The number of rules, expressed in XFST, is approximately 50 for
nouns and 300 for verbs. Both the lexicon and the rules are compiled into
a finite-state network that is then minimized and stored compactly; the
number of nodes in the network is 185,000, with more than 345,000
connecting arcs. The size of the network file is only 1Mb. We use the
network to analyze the entire corpus; on an ordinary personal computer
(with a 500MHz processor and 320Mb of memory), this takes less than
20 seconds.

3.4 Graphical user interface

We designed a graphical user interface for accessing the information
stored in the database. As users of the system are not expected to be
proficient in SQL, a database query language, the GUI provides menus
for easing the construction of rather complex queries (see Fig. 3).
The top part of the GUI is used for expressing queries. Queries can
refer to a single word in the corpus or to several words; in the latter case,
each sub-query refers to a single word. Sub-queries can be combined
with two operators: followed immediately by, or followed by, which refers
to words following the word indicated by the previous sub-query, up to
the end of a verse. In addition, two sub-queries can refer to the same
word using the logical operators and and or.

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Each sub-query (which refers to a single word) can be used to express

information about the word’s properties. The word can be given
explicitly; or the user can ask for a certain root, or a certain pattern; or,
additionally, users can constrain the values of morphological features
such as number, gender, case, aspect, etc. Furthermore, agreement
phenomena can be queried by setting the value of some feature in a sub-
query to a variable, and using the same variable as the value of the same
feature in a different sub-query referring to a different word. The menus
are dynamic: for example, checking the value noun for the feature part of
speech, more options will pop up for constraining properties of nouns.
Different options pop up when the user opts for verb as the part of
speech.
For example, by checking the verb value for part of speech, a sub-
menu listing the twelve verb stems would open. The user can then check
stem1, for example. Checking, in addition, masc for gender, sg for
number and gen for case results in the query depicted in Fig. 3.
Once the specification of constraints is done, a button enables the
generation of an SQL query. This query can be further edited manually
by more sophisticated users. Finally, a button submits the query to the
database; the result, which is presented on a dedicated window, is a list of
all the occurrences in the corpus of words which satisfy all the constraints
(in the example of Fig. 3 there are 261 such analyses). Each occurrence is
preceded by its reference: the suura, verse, and word number; and is
followed by its analysis. The user can now select any of the analyses by
clicking on it; in the bottom frame, which constantly displays the
Qur’anic text, the view will be shifted to the actual occurrence of the
desired word, and the word will be highlighted. In the example, this is the
word bi-l-baaTil-i.

4 Results
As noted above, our system performs a full morphological analysis of the
entire Qur’an. We evaluated the accuracy of the system by manually
annotating the eighth suura, consisting of a subset of 1,248 words. For
this subset, the system produced 1,440 analyses, with an average degree of
ambiguity 1.15. Comparing the analyses of the system to the manually
annotated subset, 69 of the analyses were deemed incorrect, 205 as
possible (but perhaps contextually wrong) and 1,162 as the correct
analysis. These figures yield 93% recall, 80% precision and an f-measure
of 0.86. We believe that these measures are representative of the entire
corpus.
The system is now ready for research purposes and teaching of advanced
students in Arabic departments. Its development was conceived to
enhance a systematic syntactic analysis of the Qur’an, and therefore it
creates a basis for, and an introduction to (future) operation of, a more
comprehensive tool, that will offer a syntactic parsing of our corpus. In
what follows we discuss the system’s advantages in searching issues of
syntactic, semantic, and stylistic relevance. We also compare the usability

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Fig. 3 The graphical user interface

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of the system to existing tools, such as manual and computerized

concordances.

4.1 Range of the morphological data in the lexicon

The system provides a wealth of morphological information about the
words in the corpus. Nominals are associated with their root, pattern,
number, gender, and case; but also with subcategory information, so that
proper names, numerals, and adjectives are explicitly marked as such.
Furthermore, for the pattern ’af&al, which is used to denote three
different functions, the correct function of each lexeme is specified in the
lexicon (and can be searched for using the interface). Verbs are specified
for root, stem, aspect, mode, mood, person, number, and gender. Closed
class words are classified according to their function. For example,
pronouns are listed as demonstrative, relative, interrogative etc.; other
particles are classified as conjunctions, interrogatives, conditionals etc.
Various other (syntactic and semantic) attributes of words may be
added relatively easily. For example, verbs can be tagged as transitive/
intransitive, and their occurrences in various stems can partly be
identified according to established semantic subcategorization of these
stems. We leave such extensions for future work.

4.2 Morphological studies with syntactic implications

The morphologically annotated Qur’an is designed basically to facilitate
retrieval of data which are significant for a systematic syntactic analysis of
this corpus. Recent studies in the noun and verb structure of Semitic
languages in general and Arabic in particular emphasize the interrelation
between the two spheres. The benefit of a fully annotated inventory of
Qur’anic nouns is obvious. For example, efficient retrieval of broken
plural patterns in their immediate context is vital for the study of
morphological stipulations on syntactic agreement between heads and
their complements. Is there any rule in the selection of bararat (pattern
fa&alat) vs. ’abraar (pattern ’af&aal) as plurals of barr ‘pious’? Does this
choice affect the properties of nominal adjuncts and modifiers of the
head? We have used the system for this type of investigation.
Another example is taken from the verb domain. Parallel use of
different infinitive (nomen actionis) patterns of the same root (some-
times of the same stem, mostly of stem 1; cf., e.g., kawn, kiyaan,
kaynuunat ‘being’) calls for study of its possible stipulations. The given
Qur’anic occurrences are easily traced with our program.
Nominalization of verbs in the Qur’an is either morphological or
syntactic. As an example of a morphological process, consider taSuum-
uuna ‘you will fast, plural masculine indicative’  Siyaam-u-kum ‘fasting
2ndPlMasc’. In contrast, consider the syntactic process exemplified
by taSuum-uuna’an taSuum-uu ‘that you-fastPlMascSubjunctive’.
Comparison of such pairs which occur in the same corpus may explain
the rules of preference for selection of each construction. Our system
facilitates presentation of queries which yield the specified constructions
in their context, thereby providing the researcher with the relevant data
needed for such a comparison.

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4.3 Efficient retrieval of syntactic constructions

While the system annotates the corpus mostly with morphological
information, it can still be used to uniquely retrieve selected syntactic
phrases, or at least reduce drastically the possibility of non-relevant
occurrences. Consider the prepositional phrase called partitive min (min
al-bayaan). It typically follows a relative clause headed by a relative
pronoun (man, maa, lla(dh)ii, etc.), e.g.
Maa fa&ala min-a l-’a&maal-I l-(sh)ariirat-i
Rel did-he of the-doings-Gen the-bad-SgFemGen
‘what he did of evil doings’ or ‘the evil doings he performed’
Now manual and computerized concordances of the Qur’an adduce
upon request such data as the total number of occurrences of the
preposition min, which is 3,221. Considerable time is saved if we need to
check only the occurrence of this preposition in such constructions as
‘min, followed by a plural noun which is prefixed by the definite article’,
which is typical of this partitive min; or if our query includes the
restriction that this construction is preceded by a relative particle. In fact,
such a query produces only 12 results, all of which are instances of the
desired syntactic construction.
Such uses of the system can be demonstrated with another structure.
Classical Arabic uses an equational sentence (‘X is Y’) of the pattern
Demonstrative  Independent (‘copular’) pronoun  noun prefixed by
an article or suffixed by dependent pronoun, e.g.
’uulaa’ika hum-u l-Saadiq-u
Those are the-earnest-Nom
‘these are the earnest ones (in their belief)’
Using a concordance for retrieving such constructions, one is over-
whelmed by 368 occurrences of demonstratives. Accurate retrieval of the
specific structure is enabled by the following query: ‘Show all Demon-
stratives followed by 3rd person independent pronouns, which are followed
immediately by an article’. This yields exactly nine results, all correct.

4.4 Historical and stylistic investigations

The prophetic and political message which constitutes the Qur’an is
traditionally divided by scholars according to the Meccan and Medinan
phases of Muhammad’s activity. Study of the language of the Qur’anic
text, either as a whole or of selected parts of it, involves syntactic and
stylistic distinctions of such sentence types as indicative, imperative,
vocative, etc., which are characterized mainly by selection of different
verb aspects (perfect, imperfect-indicative, imperfect-subjunctive, passive,
or active forms, etc.), or a combination of these and certain particles,
typical phrases, etc. Critical students of the text, including historians of
early Islam, need an exhaustive language analysis of this unique text
according to these and similar parameters. Whereas stylistic investigation

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Judith Dror et al.

is as old as the first attempts to create a chronological ordering by

modern scholars of the Qur’anic message, it nevertheless has developed
but scant observations concerning the relations of the syntactic struc-
tures and their possible chronological distribution.
As an example, we demonstrate the advantages of our tools for an
analysis of stylistic themes and consider the possible implications of this
analysis for study of the Qur’an’s chronology. Let us focus on the
summons yaa ’ayy-u-haa lla(dh)iina ’aamanuu ‘O the believers’, so
typically Qur’anic. Selection of vocatives is generally of great interest,
because on the one hand it may reflect ‘ritual’ or fashionable formulae,
but on the other it may be idiosyncratic and disclose a significant aspect
of the speaker’s discourse strategies. Note that the Prophet addresses his
supporters. Here are some relevant statistics:

● It occurs in the Qur’an 89 times in 20 suuras.

● There are 149 occurrences of the vocative ’ayy-u-haa in the Qur’an
altogether, always preceded by yaa.
● In the 20 suuras in which this specific summons occurs, there are 28
other expressions opened with the yaa ’ayy-u-haa element.
● The other 32 occurrences of yaa ’ayy-u-haa expressions are found in
19 suuras.
● In all but one of its occurrences, the specific expression is in a
verse-initial position, and may well pose as address-initial in all these
cases.
● Another common Qur’anic expression with a general appellation is
yaa ’ayy-u-haa l-naas-u ‘O people’, which occurs 20 times, half of
them in the 20 suuras that include the previous expression.

We now check the chronological distribution of the various expres-

sions discussed above. Our reference is provided by three western
scholars, who divide the 114 suuras of the Qur’an into four periods of the
Prophet’s activity. Three belong to Muhammad’s twelve years of prophecy
in Mecca, and the last to his ten years in Medina. The results are the
following:

● 18 of the 20 suuras including our expression are of the Medinese

period. Of the remaining two, one is identified as belonging to the last
suuras of the third Meccan period, and the other is recognized by
some as Medinese, and by others as similar in status to the first.
● Of the group of 19 suuras which include yaa ’ayy-u-haa expressions
other than ours, 11 are of the late (third) Meccan, and one of the
Medinese period, whereas two go back to the second, and six to the
first Meccan period of Muhammad’s mission.
● It is noteworthy that all the 20 occurrences of the general appellation
yaa ’ayy-u-haa l-naas-u belong to the two later periods, namely the
third Meccan and the Medinese.
● The group of 20 suuras is further distinguished from its earlier
counterpart which includes five plurality terms of address, which are
not utterance-initial, e.g., (th)umma ’inn-a-kum ’ayy-u-haa l-Daall-

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una . . . ‘Now you, o lost ones . . . ’. This type of vocative expression is

absent in the late Meccan and Medinese suuras of both groups.

An earlier, general observation on the pattern yaa ‘ayy-u-haa l-naas-u

is noted briefly by Böwering (2000, p. 324). Böwering’s note does not
include the significant details so comfortably retrieved by our tools. It
reflects the inconclusive presentation of many other syntactico-stylistic
issues studied by earlier scholars.3 To conclude, our automatic analysis of
stylistic issues efficiently provides a large amount of linguistic structures
for consideration of seminal issues in the study of the chronology of the
Qur’anic text and the earliest history of Islam.

4.5 Teaching uses

The system is designed for teaching of classes of Qur’anic studies, in
which advanced students take first experience in independent analysis of
Classical Arabic corpora (together with acquaintance with the standard
linguistic literature), and in computational approaches to the gram-
matical study of the Qur’anic text. Students are challenged with such
tasks as composition of meaningful queries to morphological and
syntactic topics of their choice, to provide insights unnoticed in sys-
tematic grammars and specific studies. The system is available for use
over the Internet; it is used both in the classroom and, through remote
access, by students at home. So far our experience with this aspect of the
system’s use is limited to a small number of graduate students, but we
expect it to be used more extensively for teaching purposes in the future.

5 Conclusion
We described a system that uses state-of-the-art finite-state technology
for morphological analysis of the Qur’an, and makes the results available,
through an efficient database and a graphical user interface, for complex
queries that involve not only the Qur’anic text but also its morphological,
and to some extent also syntactic and semantic, properties. The system is
being used for teaching and research purposes and is publicly available
on the Internet.4
This work demonstrates that the use of modern computational
linguistics technology can facilitate the construction of computational
tools for processing linguistic and literary texts, and in general aid in
Humanities research and education. The benefits of the system are
expressed in additional linguistic insights which were hard to obtain
otherwise, as was demonstrated above.
While the system is already being used to actively investigate linguistic
aspects of the Qur’an as demonstrated above, it is still under develop-
3 For a survey of earlier studies ment. Current and future extensions of the system are focused on two
on Qur’anic syntax, see major issues: improving the accuracy of the morphological annotation,
Talmon, 2001, pp. 359–67. in particular disambiguation; and extending the annotation to cover
4 http://www.cl.haifa.ac.il/ syntactic constructions.
projects/quran/index.html As can be seen in Fig. 2 above, the current annotation still results in

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Judith Dror et al.

unnecessary ambiguity, especially in the verb system. We are constantly

working on reducing the degree of ambiguity. This is done by enriching
the dictionary with additional information, and by refining the rules.
However, in order to significantly reduce the degree of ambiguity, con-
textual information must be taken into account. We are currently
implementing a cascade of finite-state transducers (Abney, 1996) in
order to enrich the morphological analysis with syntactic information
and to reduce the morphological ambiguity using short-context rules.
We do not intend to perform a full syntactic analysis of the Qur’an, but
rather to use finite-state technology for shallow parsing, detection of
phrase boundaries, recognizing certain syntactic relations, etc. Once this
endeavor is complete, the user interface will provide access to syntactic
information such as clausal and phrasal boundaries, phrase function,
etc.
Furthermore, we are currently extending the coverage of the system
from the Qur’anic corpus to other texts of Classical Arabic. We have a
significant corpus of Classical Arabic poetry (roughly half the size of the
Qur’an corpus) which is already transcribed in our notation. We develop
a variant of the rules which is aimed at this corpus; in other words, some
of the morphological rules are marked as valid for Arabic in general,
while others are corpus specific. We can thus generate two morphological
analyzers, one for each of the corpora. This endeavor will lead to lin-
guistic investigations concerning the similarities and differences between
the two corpora.
Another dimension of extensions which we plan to pursue in the
future involves enrichment of the annotation, especially by semantic and
extra-linguistic information. For example, tagging of verses, groups of
verses, suuras, and whole parts of the Qur’an according to chronological
order (there are at least four, basically similar, established scientific
systems) will add an important dimension to statistical studies based on
our system. Regular use of certain (groups of) language patterns is
indicative of the relevance of suggested chronological divisions of the text
according to Muhammad’s detailed biography. A combination of lexical
and morpho-syntactic elements with chronological information is a
significant contribution to the critical study of the Qur’anic language as
a mirror of Muhammad’s life. We hope that these extensions will be
instrumental in investigating the stylistic structure of the Qur’an, the
text’s history, and its syntactic intricacies, and will eventually contribute
to our understanding of its contents.

Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Gal Goldschmidt and Eden Orion for their technical
support in setting up this system. We benefited greatly from the support
of Xerox Research Center Europe, and in particular from the help of Ken
Beesley and Ágnes Sandor. The work of the two last authors was
supported by the Israeli Science Foundation, grants no. 136/01 and
745/99, as well as by a grant from The Caesarea Edmond Benjamin de

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Morphological Analysis of the Qur’an

Rothschild Foundation Institute for Interdisciplinary Applications of

Computer Science at the University of Haifa.

Rafi Talmon 1948–2004: A Tribute

Rafi Talmon was born in Haifa in 1948 and died in Haifa on June 7,
2004. Since his Tel Aviv University doctoral dissertation on the Syntax of
Sibawaihi’s ‘al-Kitab’, he had been investigating the Arabic language
intensively, in particular its syntax and, more recently, its spoken dialects.
He published several books and numerous scientific articles on various
aspects of Arabic language and culture, most notably the early Arabic
grammarians, the syntax of the Qur’an and Palestinian Arabic dialects.
He was the backbone of the Department of Arabic Language and
Literature at the University of Haifa, which he chaired from 1997–2000.
Rafi had a true understanding of the utility of computers in literary
and linguistic research, and was greatly attracted by the advantages of
computational technology. He founded a Multimedia Unit at the Uni-
versity of Haifa and later constructed an E-learning Unit which he headed
for three years. Recently, he coordinated a research group on A Study of
Palestinian Arabic Dialects at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He insisted on introducing compu-
tational processing into this project; linguistic data that were collected by
the group were processed to produce a set of linguistic maps, demon-
strating dialectal variation.
I started to work with Rafi on the Annotated Qur’an in 2001. It was
not easy: our different backgrounds seemed too far apart to be bridged
over. With time, however, we found a common language and our
meetings became extremely enjoyable. He pushed forward this project
with all his endless energy, and I was trying hard to catch up. The work
we report on here was only the beginning: Rafi was interested in syntactic
and, in particular, stylistic analysis of the Qur’an, and morphology was
the first step. We continued to work on extensions of the system even as
his illness worsened. I installed the latest version of the system, with a
graphical display of the results along chronological axes, two weeks
before he died. He never saw it. May he rest in peace.
Shuly Wintner

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Appendix: Characteristics of the Transcription

Rather than use the standard Arabic script, our system uses a phonemic
transcription of the text, in which some of the ambiguity is reduced. The
transcription is based on pure ASCII notations, largely with single-
symbol equivalents of the Arabic graphemes, and double letters expres-
sing long vowels. A conversion table of the consonants and vowels is
given in Fig. 4.

The conventions of the Arabic orthography are basically retained, e.g.,

one-letter particles which are prefixed to the noun or verb are hyphen-
ated to the following word (wa-kaana ‘and was’), as are pronominal and
case/mood suffixes (yas’al-u-nii ‘he will ask-indicative-me’). In general,
hyphenation serves to isolate noun bases from the various affixes. This
process is practically inapplicable for Arabic verbal forms, whose com-
plexity calls for creation of a detailed set of derivation rules instead.
Our transcription is largely phonemic; e.g., we treat the article
invariably as l-, regardless of its assimilation with the first consonant of
the following noun (hence, l-Daall-iina ‘those who lost their way’, not
D-Daall-iina, etc.). Nevertheless, we record in our transcription major
phonetic peculiarities, especially those reflected in the traditional script.
Included are:
● Assimilatory and dissimilatory processes, e.g., taSaddaqa  SSaddaqa
‘gave alms’; yahtadii  yahiddii ‘behaves righteously’; min-maa 
mim-maa ‘from which’; ’an-laa  ’al-laa ‘so that not’; tata(sh)aqqaq-u
 ta(sh)aqqaq-u ‘it will split’; etc.;

Fig. 4 Conversion table of the

Arabic characters.

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Judith Dror et al.

● Several pausal forms (prolongation of vowel at verse-end), e.g.,

l-Zunuun-a l-Zunuun-aa ‘the evil thoughts’;
● Shortening of long vowels in word endings, e.g., fa-rhabuu-nii  fa-
rhabuu-ni ‘so fear Me’, l-daa&ii  l-daa&i ‘he who calls (God) in
prayer’, sa-nad&uu  sa-nad&u ‘we shall call’.
● Other peculiarities, e.g. omission of the verb’s final i, without restor-
ation of the original -hu of the dependent pronoun: wa-yattaqi-hi 
wa-yattaq-hi ‘and he fears Him’; laakin ’anaa  laakin-naa ‘but I’.
We have not included in our transcription system the following
phonetic distinctions: (1) third-person masculine singular dependent
pronoun differences of uu vs. u, ii vs. i; (2) assimilations, e.g. -un 
-uassimilated consonant (as in Q9:27: gafuur-un raHiim-un, not the
assimilated gafuur-ur raHiim-un); (3) distinctions based on the many
instructions found in the tajwiid literature, such as those referring to
special quality of alophonic variations; (4) such oppositions as ‘’alif
maqSuura bi-Suurat ‘’alif vs. ‘’alif maqSuura bi-Sururat yaa’. Note also
that the last three points in the above list of major phonetic peculiarities
concern specific, largely sporadic, exceptional cases. They are included in
our system because they represent orthographic oddities of the official
Qur’anic script, which may reflect morphologically exceptional con-
structions.
Morphophonemic variations, especially in pronouns, are also pre-
served, e.g. -ii, -iy, -i, -ya (1st person singular dependent pronoun) and
even the exceptional [yaa bn-a ’umm]-a ‘O son of my mother’.
The hyphen isolates bound morphemes. It serves as an effective device
in the formulation of the morphological generation rules. Its integration
in the verb system is restricted; it marks the verb’s system of mood
morphemes (including the energicus), which are the verbal correlatives
of the nominal system of case morphemes (with or without nunation),
especially according to the Arabic grammatical tradition. Note that
according to our categorial classification active and passive participles (as
well as the nomen actionis/infinitive) are included in the verbal group.
Reflection of the case/mood bound morphemes was our guideline in
the special case of nouns and verbs with w/y third radical (and con-
sequently with several other patterns with similar behavior). Absence of
nominal case- or verbal mood-distinction yielded forms without hyphen,
e.g., the nominal *l-hudy-u/a/i  l-hudaa ‘the right way’, and the verbal
(indicative-subjunctive moods) *yabqay-u/a  yabqaa ‘he will remain’.
Opposition between these and their pairs yield: l-hudaa ‘the right way’ vs.
huda-n ‘a right way’ (the nunated form), yabqaa (both indicative and
subjunctive) ‘he will remain, he may remain’ vs. yabqa (jussive) ‘let him
remain’; and cf. the non-nunated ’iHdaa ‘one (f.)’, yusraa ‘left (f.)’,
yataamaa ‘orphans’, ’awlaa ‘prior’, etc.
Hyphenation helps to avoid ambiguity, in such cases as ’alaa (vocat-
ive) vs. ’a-laa (negative-interrogative ‘isn’t it?’), ta’t-iina ‘you will come,
2nd person singular feminine’ vs. ta’tiina ‘you will come, 2nd person plural
feminine’, tasaa’al-uu ‘that you inquire, imperfect 2nd person plural
masculine’ vs. non-hyphenated tasaa’aluu ‘perfect 3rd person plural
masculine’, also ‘imperative 2nd person plural masculine’.

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