Here are some of my latest thoughts on arabic… such as thread-first and loop (•̀ᴗ•́)و
Arabic CheatSheet
A Brisk Introduction to the Fundamentals of Arabic Grammar, نحو
In short: In English sometimes we mess-up between “I/me/my”, likewise in Arabic we might mess up with “ابو / ابا / ابي”: These are just اب followed by one of ا/ي/و (which are the pronounced case endings!)
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How do Arabs say the English “a/an/the”, as in “an apple” or “the chair”? Easy! By default, all words are indefinite (“a/an”); and made definite (“the”) by adding الـ to the front of the word.
But… there's some subtleties, which first require us to discuss vowel markings… which also change if the feminine marker ة is used, so we also need to briefly discuss gender.
English relies on word order for meaning; for example, Jim hit Bob is a sentence where the person doing the action is Jim and we know it has to be Jim, and not Bob, since Jim is the word before the action hit. However, in Arabic words can be ordered in almost any way you like! Then how do we identifiy who does an action? We use case markings: We add small symbols to the end of words to indiciate the role they play in a sentence.
With vowel markings, we can finally flesh-out the nature of “a/an/the” in Arabic… but then something wild happens if we stick an (in)definite followed by a definite! We get the concepts of ownership and complete sentences that don't need a verb!
Finally, we conclude with an explanation of why in the world English Qurans use the single word muslim where's Arabic Qurans use both مسلمون and مسلمين.
Arabic Roots: The Power of Patterns
I want to quickly introduce the Arabic language, through its “root system” —i.e., most words have 3-letters at their core— and how these roots can be placed in “patterns” to obtain new words.
I'd like to take a glance at Arabic's Verb Forms: These give you 10 words for each root!
Some interesting concepts will also be mentioned, for those curious, but should be ignored on a first reading. These will be hidden away in clickable/foldable regions.
These are notes of things that I'm learning; there's likely errors.
Glossary of Arabic Linguistic Terms
Arabic Cartoons
A simple interface to watch the engaging Arabic cartoons.
Life & Computing Science by Musa Al-hassy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License