Altara, I cannot understand why you brought Lumbard and his religious ilk into a scientific conversation about Islamic pasts.
It's normal, there is no relation.
About the Arabic script again, you are setting up strawmen, inventing motivations, and mis-representing paleographic methods.
I do not think so. I try to understand why they set aside Syriac script in the circuit to have the North Arabic 512/568 inscription and later the Quranic script purely from Nabatean (i.e Arabs origin)
I have never read a work that takes for granted or believes anything about the origins of the Arabic script; it is stated in unambiguous terms today that the Arabic script is simply the latest forms of the Nabataean BECAUSE over the last few decades very convincing paleographic arguments have been put forth supporting this.
I consider that what you call "very convincing paleographic arguments" are not convincing at all. Especially when the " as accepted by most of scholars" formula is added.
And the fact that in the period 200/512 all that is outside "Arabness" i.e, Nabatean, does not exist, as if this script has developed "alone" without any foreign influence.
This situation make me think to the Quranic situation that the Quran has developed "alone" is a pure Arabic production, etc.
It is the same situation for the script now.
Since the "pure Arabic content" of the text is no longer tenable since 5 or 10 years, whereas it was clearly affirmed before, the script have to be saved from external influence.
What we do know today of the interactions of Arabs in Iraq and Syria-Palestine, with the Syriac (West and East) is not simply possible. History does not work like that.
Jallad is not historian, MCM idem, Nehmé, idem. I consider that considering a possibility between the 2 and the 6th that in the place as Iraq/Syria-Palestine that a script can developed "alone" is saying nonsense. That this kind of statement can be done without reaction, That says a lot about the state of the field.
Paleography isn't a matter of 'what looks closer to the untrained eye' but a close scientific investigation on how a script changes over time, letter by letter and as a whole, in formed by a comparative perspective, too.
I've practice some paleography. Indeed, what you describe could have happened in European script for example (500 to 800 then to 1200 then to 1500, etc) . It is surely, in this specific situation, what happened. There, non external influence is responsible for the evolution of the script. Because there is no other script.
But the situation in Orient is totally different, it has nothing to see with the European one.
Nehme's article that you will not address or even investigate (and here you cannot appeal to the French vs. Anglo-Saxon strawman you always set up since she is in France), Macdonald's excellent articles on this subject, and even earlier all demonstrate this connection. You dismiss these but you haven't given a single scientific reason why.
Nehme is not French she's a Lebanese whom the mother tongue and the tropism is Arab. Jallad is not historian, MCM idem, Nehmé, idem (Robin idem...) Their work (for the three) is (for me...) outside history in pretending that the Quranic script has no foreign influence and comes from Nabatean as if this people were living on Mars. They weren't.
Yes I have read what you wrote - your reasons stem from a pretended greater likelihood that Syriac would be the origins of Arabic rather than Nabataean because you see Nabataean as disappeared with the political order of the State: an unsupported assumption and negated by references to Nabatu much later and indeed classical Nabataean inscriptions produced after the fall of Petra.
Nope you do not read me. I say that there is a Syriac influence (that Jallad et al. deny, speaking of an internal "evolution"). In the Nabatean script? Possible, I thinks more to a borrowing through time of Syriac elements slowly integrated and assimilated by Arabs speakers. But this evolution comes from Syriac and it is not a stand alone an genuine one. For a non historian (Jallad et al.) it is perfectly possible. On Mars, yes, In Europe with only one script yes, in Orient as we know it, I say nope.
You see the ARabic script appearing ex nihilo rather than being the result of a gradual development; from a comparative perspective gradual development is much more likely.
Not what I say.
You keep linking an outdated article by briquel-chatonnet that was written BEFORE the discovery of the darb al-bakrah material anyway, and the discovery of new pre and early islamic iscriptions, which I feel you too might be unaware of.
This material ascertain an evolution. What I contest is its granted stand alone an genuine one.
There was a stand alone evolution in Europe : one script. Not the case in Orient.
I say that there is a Syriac influence (that Jallad et al. deny, speaking of an internal "evolution"). In the Nabatean script? Possible, I thinks more to a borrowing through time of Syriac elements slowly integrated and assimilated by Arabs speakers. But this evolution comes from Syriac and it is not a stand alone an genuine one. For a non historian (Jallad et al.) it is perfectly possible. On Mars, yes, in Europe with only one script yes, in Orient as we know it, I say nope.
And here is a bit of food for thought: if the Arabic script developed from Syriac, then where are all the Syriac inscriptions in the vicinity of Arabic ones?
It has nothing to do ...
One would imagine Arabic speakers writing in Syriac letters before the development of their own script but there isn't a single pre-Islamic Arabic language inscription written in Syriac letters (while there is even examples of this in Greek letters!)
As I say you do not read me (yawn).
With the exception of the tri-lingual Zebed inscription, also containing Greek, the Arabic script occurs exactly where Nabataean inscrpitions used to occur. The inscription of Laila Nehme (Dumat al-Jandal) is a perfect example of this overlap.
And nobody has brought up the term "Arab" in any scholarship I have read. Nobody makes the claim that the Nabataeans are "Arabs", equating that with an ethnic sense. Yes obviously they spoke Arabic but this doesn't mean they are Arabs as the term comes to mean.
Regularly the Nabateans are indicated as Arabs because their language is Arabic. As none other people spoke Arabic apart Arabs... It is rather tempting to name them "Arabs". (Even those who write in Greek script...)
I can't see how you imagine some kind of pan-arab project in trying to determine which kind of Aramaic the Arabic script comes from.
Lulz.
Stop appealing to non-scientific arguments, international conspiracies between non-French scholars, and other irrelevant fantasies: if you think Arabic comes from Syriac, then use the science of the study of the development of scripts and demonstrate this, or as Moses would say: 'alquu maa antum mulquun!
Hahaha! Conspiracies!
Topic: Qur'anic studies today