Archive for 'Grammar'
Tricky Dual (both) Posted by aziza on May 23, 2010
Dual can be very tricky at times. The word (كِلا) in Arabic means ‘both’ in English. It is used mainly as part of an idaafa construction, either with a definite noun (كِلا الطالبان) ‘both students’ or a pronoun, e.g. (كِلاهما) ‘both of them’. Many people erroneously use (كِلا) with both masculine and feminine, without realizing…
A Confusing Arabic Word Pair: An and Anna Posted by aziza on May 20, 2010
There are two words that are written in the same way and that are often confusing for learners of Arabic. These words are (أنّ) ‘anna’, (أنْ) ‘an’. They are functional words that differ in the way they are used. These two words collocate with different verbs, e.g. with (عرف) ‘knew’, we must use (أنّ) which…
Fronted Predicate in Arabic Posted by aziza on May 11, 2010
In Arabic, nominal sentences typically begin with a subject (مبتدأ), which can be a noun or a pronoun, e.g. الولد طويل. ‘The boy is tall.’ هي طالبة. ‘She is a student.’ A noun that occurs as a subject is often definite, e.g. a proper noun like (محمد) or (نادية), a noun that begins with ال…
Masculine and Feminine Nouns in Arabic Posted by aziza on May 8, 2010
The distinction of gender into masculine (مذكر) and feminine (مؤنث) is an important feature of Arabic, unlike English where grammatically the great majority of words do not make this distinction clear, e.g. in English ‘student’ does not imply the gender of the person it refers to, while in Arabic (طالب) is masculine while (طالبة) is…
Passive in Arabic – part 2 Posted by aziza on Apr 25, 2010
In English, it is not uncommon to express the agent of the passivized action using a by-phrase, e.g. “this book was written by a famous author”. In Arabic, the passive construction is used mostly without the by-phrase and the agent remains unknown. When we need to use the by-phrase in Arabic, we use the expression…
Passive in Arabic – part 1 Posted by aziza on Apr 20, 2010
The passive (المبني للمجهول) form is very important and interesting. It involves changing the form and the meaning of sentences to a certain extent. In passive constructions, the object of the active sentence becomes a grammatical subject, e.g. ‘my friend wrote the book’ is an active sentence that begins with the subject. Its passive counterpart…
Arabic Prepositions: to and on/about Posted by aziza on Apr 15, 2010
In this post, I give some notes about the form and the use of two prepositions (إلى) and (على). The literal meaning of (إلى) is ‘to’, and it is used in expressions like (أذهب إلى عملي) ‘I go to my work’ and (إلى من يهمه الأمر) ‘to whom it may concern’, etc. It should be…