Asked • 04/29/19

How did the Arabic word "allah" come to have an /lˤ/ ("emphatic l")?

In Modern Standard Arabic, phonemic /lˤ/ (a.k.a. "emphatic l") <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_phonology#ref_6"> only occurs in one native word: *Allah* /ʔalˤˈlˤaːh/. (According to the linked article, it also occurs in a few loanwords.)This seems like a profoundly weird situation. If a phoneme exists at all, you'd expect it to show up more than once. Imagine a time before the loanwords with /lˤ/ were borrowed. Would allah then have been the only instance of /lˤ/ in the entire lexicon of the language? I know that's logically possible, but intuitively it strikes me as completely bizarre.So what happened? How did this weird situation come about? (Or is it less of a weird situation than I think? I'd be happy to hear about other languages that have similar "one-off" phonemes.)

1 Expert Answer

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Mazen A. answered • 10/26/19

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