From the Pages of the Defter (ص 93)

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عنوان

From the Pages of the Defter (ص 93)

المحتوى

It is tempting to attribute the mutilation of a number of village names in the 1871 provincial
salname — Bani N ‘aja for Bani N ‘aim, Bani Najjar for Bayt Fajjar, Luna for Idhna/Idna, or al-
Saqr for Sufla, to name a few of the inconsistencies apparent in Table 2.1 — to the scribe
having lost his glasses or the ink on the document he copied from having been smeared as it
was carried through the rain (And, who knows?). However, Ottoman scribes are known for
their copying skills, so these musings are likely unlikely. Certainly more relevant is the fact
that scribes copied from document to document, therefore this nomenclature had a
tendency to persist. For example, in the early twentieth century one sees throughout the
correspondence from Istanbul to Jerusalem about the Yatta village - Zullam bedouin land
conflict then ongoing in the Hebron district, that the village of Yatta is consistently rendered
as it is in the salname above, as Batta. However, in locally authored documents of the same
period, its name was consistently spelled phonetically correct, either Ua: or Ada, 158
Although examination of Hebron court registers of this period show that the way to spell
names of people and places were not yet standardized, the various spellings one observes of
a given name in local records tend to yield the same pronunciation.
This nomenclature can also be extended backwards in time. As an example, we can
consider the village of Idhna. Its proper name is Idhna, but until today, while Idhna is the
3 This war is the subject of an article | am now preparing for submission for publication. For the non-
reader of Arabic: the distinction between the B (ba) and the Y (ya) within a word in Arabic (and Ottoman
Turkish) is slight, made by placing either one or two dots under the line of the word. A number of the
mistakes seen above are of this nature, confusion between two letters that can be difficult to distinguish
from one another in handwritten documents.
76

هو جزء من

From the Pages of the Defter

تاريخ

٢٠١٦

المنشئ

Susynne McElrone

مجموعات العناصر

Generated Pages Set

Theses رسائل ماجستير ودكتوراه