I figured as much. But the Arabic script being influenced more by Syriac than Nabatean is still a minority opinion. This has been the case ever since the days of Nöldeke.
For Quranic studies scholars, Nöldeke is a kind of Bukhari or Muslim.
Al-Jallad thinks that there is no evidence for a Syriac influence on the Arabic script. Relying on the Yazid inscription, Al-Jallad argues that if Syriac did influence Arabic, then one would not find the dot above the dāl, since in Syriac the dot is always placed under.
Al-Jallad is a Muslim who want desperately that the peninsula be responsible of the Quranic script.
I've posted sometimes ago here the academia link article of F. Briquel-Chatonnet. I encourage you to translate it with
https://www.deepl.com/translator. It's perfectly clear to me that Nöldeke is wrong and that she's right. A scripture should be envisaged as a system and not letter by letter like Al Jallad et al. do. The photos she shows proves that she's right, whatever Nöldeke, Al Jallad et al. said.
Al-Jallad also thinks that the Quran could not have been written in Arabia Patrea. Per al-Jallad, even in the sixth century, the Quran's dialect and orthography do not match the Arabic inscriptions of the southern Levant.
What Al-Jallad states is nonsense and prove its incompetency as an historian. The inscriptions we have and the Quran are surely not written by the same people. Shepherds are not
literati people.That would be known. On the other hand Quranic manuscripts show that there is no stable orthography at that time.
His colleague, Marijn van Putten, agrees and goes on to say that the linguistic facts of pre-Islamic Syro-Palestine are irreconcilable with Quranic Arabic.
Is the hamza a needed artefact in the Arabic language to the point of being indispensable to people who have it in their own language to read the Quranic text which have not it?
Not at all. Hamza or not in your own Arabic you can read perfectly well the Quran ; that was the case of the grammarians of the 9th.c.
On the other hand, van Putten states that the Quranic language is heavily influenced by Aramaic he cannot say which one but for him, not Syriac. This point is very interesting, he will publish a paper about that this Fall. But in the same time he states that he do not know very well Aramaic... : "'The semantics of 'qurʾān', which seems to mean 'holy recitation' is not even a particularly good match for the specific meaning in Syriac where it apparently received a specialized meaning of 'Scripture lesson'.
Someone who knows Syriac better than me might be able to confirm."
This kind of declaration seems strange ; when you do not know very well something you cannot affirm things like he does : it seems to me very imprudent.
I personally find the Syriac-hypothesis to be very intriguing. Especially the fact that the Syriac script looks similar to the Arabic one.
The look similar is impressive. Especially in the article of F. Briquel-Chatonnet. I repeat to be clear that the Syriac origin of the Quranic script has nothing to do with the Luxenberg hypothesis which is not about the Quranic script but the vocabulary of the Quran.
Topic: Qur'anic studies today