We already know that Arabic words are either a noun اسم , a verb فعل  or a harf (particle) حرف . Today we say that all Arabic words الكلمات are either Mo’rab(ah) مُعربة or Mabni(yah) مبنية but what do these terms mean?

A Mo’rab word is that word which changes the shape of its ending (last letter) because of its position in the sentence or because of the function it does in the sentence (Grammatical Case). These words are pronounced differently; they have different diacritics (tashkeel تشكيل ) on the last letter.

     EX.   1 – Peace is the hope of the world. السلامُ أملُ العالمِ

2 – Peace is the hope of the world. إنَّ السلامَ أملُ العالمِ

3 – The world looks forward to peace. يتطلعُ العالمُ إلى السلامِ

4 – We visit he who visits us. نزورُ مَن يزورُنا

5 – We won’t visit he who hates us. لنْ نزورَ مَن يكرهُنا

6- We didn’t visit our friends yesterday. لَمْ  نزُرْ أصدقاءَنا أمس  

      You can see from the examples that a Mo’rab word can be a noun or a present verb. In the first three examples the noun peace السلام  ends with a dammah, fathah and Kasrah respectively. The different endings are a result of the different syntactic positions of the noun and the effect of other words on that noun. In the other three examples, the present verb (visit نزور) has different endings for the same reasons (Dammah, Fatha and Sukkoon).

A Mabni word is that word which doesn’t change the shape of its ending (last letter) whatever position it has in the sentence. These words are always pronounced with the same Harakah; they have the same diacritics (tashkeel تشكيل ) on the last letter.

       EX.  1– These poets are creative. هؤلاءِ الشعراءُ مُبدعون

2- These poets are creative. إنَّ هؤلاءِ الشعراءَ مُبدعون

3- There is good poetry to these poets. لِهؤلاءِ الشعراءِ شِعرً جيدً

4- Ahmad went to school in the morning ذهبَ احمدُ إلى المدرسةِ في الصباح

5- Where and when shall we meet? أينَ و متى سنتقابل ؟  

6- Mona is the girl who won the prize.  مُنى هي البنتُ التي فازت بالجائزة

       You can see from the examples above that a Mabni word can be a noun or  verb. Also, all Arabic particles (harf حرف  ) are Mabni words.

In my next blog I will present a list of all Mabni word categories.

(Note 1: Mo’rab مُعرب is an adjective and I’raab إعراب  is the noun).

(Note 2: Mabni مبنى is an adjective and Binaa بناء is a noun).      

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Peace  سلام /Salam/