The Quran: Key Word Distribution, Correlations and Collocation Frequencies.: Adjectives, Nouns, Proper Nouns and Verbs 9781463244194

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The Quran: Key Word Distribution, Correlations and Collocation Frequencies.

Gorgias Islamic Studies

16

Gorgias Islamic Studies spans a wide range of subject areas, seeking to understand Islam as a complete cultural and religious unity. This series draws together political, socio-cultural, textual, and historical approaches from across disciplines. Containing monographs, edited collections of essays, and primary source texts in translation, this series seeks to present a comprehensive, critical, and constructive picture of this centuries- and continent-spanning religion.

‫القرآن‬ The Quran Key Word Distribution, Correlations and Collocation Frequencies Adjectives, Nouns, Proper Nouns and Verbs

Volume 3 R - Ḏ̣ / ‫ظ‬

-‫ر‬

Elie Wardini

gp 2022

Gorgias Press LLC, 954 River Road, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA www.gorgiaspress.com 2022 Copyright © by Gorgias Press LLC

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise without the prior written permission of Gorgias Press LLC. ‫ܐ‬

1

2022

ISBN 978-1-4632-4418-7

ISSN 2637-3998

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A Cataloging-in-Publication Record is available at the Library of Congress. Printed in the United States of America

The Quran: Key Word Distribution, Correlations and Collocation Frequencies The aim with the present series, The Quran: Key Word Distribution, Correlations and Collocation Frequencies, is to present key data related to the lexicon of the Quran, in terms of Key Word distribution and lexical associations. The digital text used for this purpose is the Uthmani text of the Tanzil Quran Text (for attribution see below). This text is widely used, and we have conducted some comparison to pre-digital age printed editions of the Quran. All vocalized Arabic text is quoted unaltered in any shape or form from the Tanzil text. Unvocalized Arabic text and transcriptions are my own. In this volume, each Key Word (KW), here adjectives, nouns, proper nouns and verbs, in the Quran which lemma begins with R/‫ ر‬through Ḏ̣/‫ ظ‬is presented together with the following key data: Degree of Concentration, Weighted Distribution, Correlations and Collocation Frequencies. The Key Words are always referenced by their lemma and are sorted alphabetically according to Arabic and UNICODE order. In lemmatizing the words, no attention has been given to the semantics of each word. Only on rare occasion have similar forms of words or proper nouns been separated in order to avoid confusion. In assigning each word a lemma, Classical dictionaries and Quran commentaries, as well as modern Quran dictionaries have been consulted. Deciding on these is not always obvious, since classical dictionaries and commentaries sometimes either disagree or present divergent variant readings or root and lemma attributions. iii

In the present series, the following definitions and computations are applied and the results presented: • Degree of Concentration (°concentration): a. nr. of attestations of the KW in the Quran b. nr. of ayas in which the KW is attested c. nr. of suras in which the KW is attested d. nr. of unique collocations* with which the KW is attested => °concentration of the KW *For a definition of collocation, see below.

Degree of Concentration is based on the four data points a, b, c and d, as described above, where each data point is a vector which magnitude influences the overall spread of the Key Word in the Quran. The resultant °concentration (in %) is therefore a normalized vector which is computed as follows: °concentration = 1/z (inverse of spread) z = normalized y (**see definition below) y = √x (in order to accommodate extreme variation) x = √(a² + b² + c² + d²) (sum of vectors in 4D) **Normalized where 1 attestation, in 1 aya, in 1 sura with 0 collocations = 100% °concentration (16 cases are attested).

• Weighted Distribution: e. nr. of attestations of the KW in each aya or sura => weighted distribution of the KW in each aya or sura

Weighted Distribution (WD) is computed as follows: WD = √w (in order to accommodate extreme variation) w = nr. of attestations of KW in aya or sura / total nr. of words in aya or sura

The Weighted Distribution of a certain Key Word represents therefore of the percentage that each Key Word occupies in iv

an aya or sura relative to the total nr. of words in that aya or sura. The following graph plots the weighted value of 1 word in each sura. It forms a background base-line (in grey) for the relative Weighted Distribution of each Key Word attested in the Quran (in black under each lemma).

The Weighted Distribution of Key Words across the suras is represented graphically and is placed after the list of the numbers of attestations of each Key Word in the suras. • Correlations: Correlations are relative distribution patterns of Key Words across the Quran. Correlations are calculated with Pearson’s Correlation Coefficient r for each Key Word attested in the Quran relative to every other attested Key Word. In the present work, correlations are based on the Weighted Distribution (as defined above) of each Key Word in every aya (n=6236; nr. of ayas) across the suras. r ranges from -1 (100% inversely correlated) to 1 (100% correlated). The (statistically significant) critical value for n=6236 is |r|%0.025, !=0.05, p&0.05. The zero and alternate hypotheses (H0 & Ha) are as follows: H0: the distribution of KW1 is statistically different from KW2 Ha: the distribution of KW1 is statistically similar to KW2

Key Words that have a relative correlation coefficient that is less than the critical value |r|