Archaic Arabic loans in Sindhi
An interesting feature of Sindhi is the presence of very nativised loans from Arabic. Some of these are shared with its upstream neighbour Saraiki, but this phenomenon is otherwise not found in other neighbouring languages. Plenty of South Asian languages have loans from Persian and even Turkic languages like Chagatai, due to the long history of Persianate kingdoms and sultanates in the region (most notably the Mughals). However, direct loans from Arabic into any South Asian language are historically pretty rare.1
Here are some of the Arabic loans into Sindhi that I’ve noticed:2
ٿُومَ tʰūma “garlic” < Arabic ثُوم ṯūm
بيضو bezo “egg” < Arabic بَيْض baydˤ
بَصَرُ basaru “onion” < Arabic بَصَل basˤal
خَميسَ xamīsa “Thursday” < Arabic الْخَمِيس al-ḵamīs
اَربَع arbaʕ /arbā/ “Wednesday” < Arabic الْأَرْبِعَاء al-ʔarbiʕāʔ
جَبَلُ jabalu “mountain” < Arabic جَبَل jabal
(A neat thing is that the days of the week are of mixed etymology. Saturday to Tuesday are native from Sanskrit, Wednesday and Thursday are Arabic, and Friday is Persian/Arabic.)
The historical explanation for this has to be the Umayyad conquest of Sindh in 711 CE, which integrated Sindh into the Arab-ruled caliphate and brought native speakers of Arabic in direct contact with Sindhi speakers—but clearly not into the North Indian plains, hence the unique Arabic loaning into Sindhi. Sindh was under direct rule of the Arab caliphates until the mid 800s CE, after which it able to assert local autonomy under the ethnically Arab Habbari dynasty. So, Sindh was ruled by native speakers of Arabic until its capitulation to Mahmud of Ghazni in 1025 CE—ending a period of three centuries of direct linguistic contact between Arabic and Sindhi.
Besides Sindhi, the other exception to this is Malayalam, which had contact with Arabic-speaking traders (via sea) around when Sindhi did. An obvious direct Arabic loan into Malayalam is Ṟamaḷān for “Ramadan” reflected the original lateral pronunciation of the term in Arabic, and not Persian Ramazān. (See this tweet by Karthik Malli.)
This is a running list that I may expand.