@afzaque @koutchoukalimar This falls in the category of: "Scholars mystified by manuscripts not agreeing with what Arabic looks like in 20th century typeset books".
Blau in fact argues that whenever one sees a dotted yāʾ it confirms the absence of Hamzah. This is an absurd statement.
Blau in fact argues that whenever one sees a dotted yāʾ it confirms the absence of Hamzah. This is an absurd statement.
@afzaque @koutchoukalimar 1. To Blau, no hamzah is a feature of "Middle Arabic"; But there are thousands of manuscripts of dotted yāʾs (with no hamzah) on top which are otherwise in perfect classical Arabic. This probably does not even mean the hamzah was unpronounced, just... incomplete orthography.
@afzaque @koutchoukalimar 2. As the footnote you show basically shows: it's totally possible for a dotted yāʾ to carry a hamzah. The fact that we don't typeset it like that today, is mostly because it isn't possible with unicode encoding and because it's not part of modern orthographic practice.
@afzaque @koutchoukalimar The expectation of modern typographic practices to generalize for the whole of the history of Arabic writing doesn't make much sense; Moreover, it does not seem like Blau ever did a reality check to confirm his modern-orthograph-based theory.
@afzaque @koutchoukalimar 3. O, and of course; there are countless examples of dotted yāʾs for carriers of the Hamzah in old Quranic manuscripts. But to Blau, the Quran is the foremost example of Classical Arabic. But it has a feature he associated with Middle Arabic?! It's all silly. 
@afzaque @koutchoukalimar And this is why writing the history of the Arabic language should be evidence based, and not based on whatever you've been told in class is 'Correct'. </rant>
@afzaque @koutchoukalimar O turns out I wasn't done ranting: The same is true for authors who try to show that the alif maqṣūrah is different from the yāʾ, because it does not take dots.
Here's ḥattā and yā-mūsā spelled حتي and يموسي
Here's ḥattā and yā-mūsā spelled حتي and يموسي
@afzaque @koutchoukalimar O and: Please share with me your photos of Classical Arabic manuscripts that either dot their hamza-seat yāʾs or do both. I run into it often enough that I'm not surprised by it, but I'm how early/late the first/last examples of it are in literary texts outside of the Quran.
