Arabic-L:TRANS:allaah

[Dilworth B. Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Fri 02 Nov 2001
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject: allaah

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1)
Date:  02 Nov 2001
From: John Makhoul <makhoul at bbn.com>
Subject: allaah

My arguments concerning the Allah issue are purely linguistic.

1. The most important statement of Muslim belief is usually translated
    into English as: "There is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his
    Prophet."  If we translated Allah as God, then the same statement
    would appear as "There is no god but God and Mohammed is his
    Prophet."  But try to speak it this way and it does not sound right
    because the lowercase 'god' is pronounced exactly the same as the
    uppercase 'God' and the meaning -- the uniqueness of God -- is
    totally lost.

    Now, one could fix this problem by translating Allah as 'The God',
    with the word 'The' pronounced as 'thee', indicating uniqueness.
    So, the statement becomes "There is no god but The God ...", which
    sounds a little awkward to me.  My guess is that if one were to do
    that throughout the Koran, it would really result in an awkward
    translation into English.

    So, I see the translation that is usually adopted as a simple
    linguistic solution to the translation problem and the awkwardness
    of possible alternative translations.

2. It is important to note that Arabic must have had its own problems
    in putting a word for the unique God.  The word Allah is very
    different from the word al-ilaah; the latter would be translated
    simply as 'the god' in lowercase, like 'the god Zeus' for example.
    Since Arabic does not have the mechanism of capitalization, nor the
    mechanism of saying 'thee' for emphasis and uniqueness, it had to
    invent some way of differentiating this particular God.  The
    solution that was adopted was to use (or maybe even invent) a new
    sound that is unique to this word, namely, the lam mufaxxama, or
    emphatic lam.  I think that Allah is the only word in Arabic that
    uses an emphatic lam.  Thus, Allah becomes very different from
    al-ilaah.  (It could be that the word Allah already existed and
    then was taken to be used for this unique context.  My argument is
    simply that, linguistically, a solution had to be found to give a
    unique name to the one God.)

John Makhoul

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End of Arabic-L:  02 Nov 2001