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Originally Posted by inavalan
If you don't mind, I found this: The name "Allah" is made of four letters in Arabic, ا ل ل ه (or Alif Lam Lam Ha, from right to left, A-L-L-H), which when brought together make الله. How do you get from ا ل ل ه to الله ? |
This question requires knowing Arabic to answer... ^^"
I know a little bit of Arabic (really little!), but I know the "w" means the consonant it is on is repeated, so in this case, it means "ل" is repeated. You can see a straight line above "w", and it signifies "ā".
You may realise that this writing system has an emphasis of consonants instead of vowels. It is because in Semitic languages three consonants together usually form the root of a word, which is the most important, and by changing the vowels between the consonants, one can generate a bunch of words that are related to that root. This is an example from the "Semitic languages" page of Wikipedia: 'the root meaning "write" has the form k-t-b. From this root, words are formed by filling in the vowels and sometimes adding additional consonants, e.g. كتاب kitāb "book", كتب kutub "books", كاتب kātib "writer", كتّاب kuttāb "writers", كتب kataba "he wrote", يكتب yaktubu "he writes", etc.'