Licit Magic — GlobalLit Working Papers №18. Taṣḥīf: A Poetics of Misreading
In Arabic and Persian poetry, words gain an aesthetic value for their shape, the way they appear in writing. A visual parallelism between words defines a special kind of paronomasia known as script paronomasia (jinās-i khaṭṭ). Through this visual paronomasia the word مرد (pronounced as mard and meaning “man”) corresponds to مزد (pronounced as mozd and meaning “wage”) without having any semantic or prosodic affinity, and simply because their written forms differ only in one diacritical dot.
The morphological features of Persian letters (which were adapted from Arabic alphabet following the Muslim conquest in seventh century) increase the possibility of mistaking one word for another, especially in manuscripts. As can be seen below, 29 out of the 32 letters of the Persian alphabet can be classified in 11 groups. Each group consists of letters with the same general morphology. What distinguishes the letters in each group is the number and the position of diacritical dots (nuqṭa).
In Arabic and Persian poetry, the potential of misreading is exploited as a technique named taṣḥīf. Through taṣḥīf, the poet chooses words that are read differently with a slight change in dotting patterns, hence creating ambiguity.
GlobalLit Working Paper 18 deals with the potentials of visual paronomasia and misreading in Persian poetics, and what they imply for textual criticism.
