THE HAMZAH WITHOUT A FORM OR WITH A CONVERTED FORM AT THE BEGINNING OF THE WORD IN THE ORIGINAL SCRIPT OF THE QUR'AN: A MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYTICAL STUDY

Abstract

This research examines the established historical facts regarding the orthography of the Holy Quran, specifically noting that the hamzah did not have a distinct form in the original script of the mushaf. The hamzah, which has four forms, never appeared with two identical letters together. The hamzah that is pronounced and is represented by the letter "alif" at the beginning of a word did not have a distinct form when it appeared alongside another hamzah. Thus, when two or three hamzah occurrences were present, starting with the interrogative hamzah in a single word, they were represented by a single "alif" until the notation of the hamzah was standardized as a "hamzah on the line" (ء) by Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi. They represented it as follows: (أ) for the hamzah of قطع when it is pronounced with a dammah or fatḥah, and (إ) for the hamzah of قطع when it is pronounced with a kasrah. They then added a hamzah in this form (ء) to the alif and placed it on the line, except when the hamzah followed the definite article "al," where it did not have its own representation; they placed it between the "lam" and what follows without adding an extra alif for it, nor did they represent it with the newly introduced "maddah" form (آ), as the maddah in Quranic orthography represents the opposite; it indicates a long vowel combined with a hamzah, which does not occur at the beginning of a word since the alif is silent, and Arabic does not begin with a silent letter. Furthermore, the hamzah at the beginning of a word was never represented by an alif. There are words where the form of the hamzah changed and was represented by either "waw" or "ya" due to its connection to another word, whereas it should have remained represented by an alif had there been a separation, such as in: (هؤلاء) and (لئن). This research also focused on the morphological weight of words and any alterations they underwent, whether through addition, reduction, or substitution, returning to their original trilateral weight. It relied on a descriptive analytical methodology.