A Brisk Introduction to the Fundamentals of Arabic Grammar, نحو

What does حملت mean? Since ح−م−ل means “carrying”, and ـت is the past tense suffix, we have at least the following meanings:

Without the short symbols, the only way to distinguish the intended meaning is for the word to be contextually located within a sentence —and even then, this would require experience.

Likewise, what does نصرت فاطمة mean? Does it mean “Fatimah helped (someone)”? Or does it mean “Fatimah was helped (by someone)”?

One English sentence can be written a number of ways in Arabic:

The way the listener knows what’s the subject and what’s the object is quite literally carried around with the nouns themselves. The endings make all the difference.

The second instance above might seem weird at first, since the object comes before the subject, but it is more common when the object is an attached pronoun:

This is a common example of the verb-object-subject word order!

Anyhow, in general, in Arabic the action word, the verb, can occur in the first or second positions within a sentence whereas the subject (the person doing the action) and the object (the thing/person being acted upon) can occur anywhere! Here's another example:

Finally, as we will encounter later in this article, Arabic also has sentences without verbs! These are just the subject followed by the predicate, which is what is happening to the subject. Since these non-verbal sentences are only two pieces (possibly complicated pieces), there are two ways to order them and both are valid!

This words-changing-due-to-role behaviour also happens in English, but mostly with pronouns: For example, He saw me   ≈   I was seen by him.

In English, there are 3 ways to refer to oneself: I, me, my. For example,

Here's the rules:

• (Nominative!) When I am doing something, I say: I did it.
• (Accusative!) When something is being done to me, I say: It was done to me.
• (Genitive!) When I have an item, I say: My thing....

So the word used to refer to myself changes depending on what is happening by me, to me, or of me / what I own.

Just as people dress according to roles or occassions (such as a suit at work and pajamas in bed), so too Arabic words have different case endings, التشكيلُ, to show their roles within a sentence.

More accurately, the genitive case is used when a word follows a preposition and it is used for all words after the first word in a possessive phrase —which is known as إظافة in Arabic, covered below. [Idafa is Arabic's way of quickly introducing possession without the preposition “of”: English has Jim's apple, whereas Arabic would say (the) apple (of) Jim, تفاحة جیم .]

Nunation/تنوين/Tanween: When the word is indefinite, one “doubles” the symbols, which causes an extra -n sound to each vowel: u ـُـ, a ـَـ, i ـِـ are replaced by un ـٌـ, an ـًـ, in ـٍـ. (If a word does not end in ة, the ـًـ ending is written اً.) This is all covered below. For example,

Anyhow, with the little we now know about these case endings, let's do one more puzzle!

Depending on the formality of some Arabic text, such as Classical Arabic or Quranic Arabic, you might see and hear additional grammatical endings.

In this article, we'll see that these endings —even when not explicitly written as markings— do alter the writing of words in certain situations. For example, درست كتابا has its markings guessed to be دَرَسْتُ كِتَاباً “I studied a book” —the extra alif is really the alif-tanween of the accusative case, اً.

What do you think the following English sentences say?

• Y cn prbbly rd ths sly dspt th lck f vwls!

  You can probably read this easily despite the lack of vowels!

• Ys, y cn lv wtht vwls! Y cn vn wrt nglsh wtht thm; t nly nds sm prctc nd th rslt s drstclly shrtr sntncs! f nd b, lk Arbc, s vwls nly whn thr s mbguty.

  Yes, you can live without vowels! You can even write English without them; it only needs some practice and the result is drastically shorter sentences! If need be, like Arabic, use vowels only when there is ambiguity.

It might seem weird, for an English speaker, for vowels to be left-out, but conversely an Arabic speaker might think it's extra effort in English to write out every vowel. It's different cultures, and traditions.

Just as it's a bit funny to drop the vowels in English, we can drop the dots in Arabic and the result is still somewhat readable! In-fact, old Arabic did not have dots written down!

Translation: Do you know that you can read complete passage without points? Because you are able to understand words through the context of the sentences, and the proof is that you have just read this passage. Source

Taa Marbuta ة is a formed by taking the ends of ت and tying-them together to get ة. (Note: ت is also known as “ta mabsuta”, which literally means the “happy t” since the letter ت looks like a smiling face “🙂”)

Examples:

Example #1

The Taa Marbuta is special in contrast to the other letters: It can only be written at the end of a word, either unjoined as ة or joined as ـَـة:

• It is purely a grammatical letter, it has no sound!
  • It is the ending of most singluar feminine nouns/adjectives, or nouns referring to female people.
• It always follows a Fatha vowel, as in جدَة or غرفَة, and so people would say ة makes a short a sound —but this is really due to the vowel that always comes before ة!

Example #0 changes to #1

As a suffix, ـَـة / ة is used to make feminine adjectives or nouns from masculine ones.

Examples #2 and #3

It becomes “untied/opened ت” when suffixes/endings are added.

• The formal indefinite, Example #2, is discussed below.

Example #4

A feminine word, ending in ـَـة is made plural by extending the Fatha into a long vowel ـَـا and opening the Taa Marbuta into ت.

Example #5

When it is followed by another word, the pronunciation of ة is t −-−though the spelling remains unchanged. Putting two words beside each other is known as possession, addition, إظافة, and it's covered below.

Technically, Arabic does not have an indefinite article like English's a/an. Instead, indefininte/nonspecific words have doubled case markings: So instead of ـِـ ـُـ ـَـ we have ـٍـ ـٌـ ـًـ, where the second marking is pronounced as a ن/n sound. This is known as تنوین/Tanween, or nunation, which means pronouncing the letter ن at the end of a word, or putting a nun/ن on. (Often the double ـُـ is written as one ـُـ with a tail: ـٌـــ.)

• Notice that if a noun ends in ة “tied-up t”, the t is actually pronounced before the Tanween.
• Secondly, unless a word ends in ة or ی or ـاء, then double-fatha ـًـ has to be written on an alif as اً. This alif is a spelling convention; it is not pronounced; unlike case markings, it is always written (e.g., كتابا possibly without the ـًـ).

There is no indefinite article equivalent to the English “a/an”. However, the large majority of nouns and adjectives have tanween (the addition of the sound n) to the final vowel of a word) to indicate that the word is indefinite:

However, in everyday, non-vowelised, Arabic there is no separate word/marking for “a/an”, as in “a chair” or “an apple”.

• By default, words are indefinite: For example, مكتب means “an office”, even though there is no separate word for the “an”.

• To make a noun definite we add الـ “al” joined to it, which means “the”. For example:

  “the office”

  ≈ “the” ⇸ “office”

  ≈ ال ⇷ مكتب

  ≈ المكتب

  What are directed additions ⇸ and ⇷?

  I will use directed addition symbols ⇸ and ⇷ to mean the same as “+” but also to indicate the direction one should read it. For example, X + Y could mean X Y in English's left-to-right reading, but it could also mean Y X in Arabic's right-to-left reading. Whereas X ⇷ Y can only mean X Y (read right-to-left).

Frequently, the sound of الـ al may have both the a sound, the l sound, or both sounds change! The rules are pretty simple.

• These are changes in pronunciation only, the spelling of “al” الـ doesn't change.

The above two rules are explained by the following theoretical justification.

Exercise: From your knowledge of pronunciation of ة and the two special pronunciation rules of الـ, guess how the following would be read.

Remember: Since tanween indicates indefiniteness, a definite word cannot have tanween!

😉 Arabic is so simple! Unlike other languages, Arabic has الـ for the regardless of whether we're talking about one person, or many! For example, in French, we have 3-ways to say the: le, la, les.

Arabic expresses possession by placing two nouns next to each other: possessor ⇷ possessed (read right-to-left). This is إظـافـة, which literally means addition.

Since the possessed item is known to belong to the possessor, the English translations all use “the” before the possessed item: The X of Y. That is, just as in English Y's X means X is known to definitely belong to Y, Arabic treats the possessed word in an إظافة as “definite in meaning” (even though it is not “definite in form; has no الـ”); see example #3 above. We can summarise this observation as follows.

The result of an addition, إظافة, is noun phrase which itself can be the possessor of something else. Whether this result is definite or not is determined by whether the final noun in the إظافة is definite or not; see example #2 above.

The result of an addition, إظافة, is noun phrase which itself can be the possessor of something else. As such, we can repeat the إظافة construction onto itself a number of times: