Archive for 'Grammar'
Active participle in Arabic Posted by aziza on Jun 23, 2009
The active participle (اسم الفاعِل) is a very common and a very important form in Arabic. It is used a lot in both Standard and Colloquial Arabic, but it is used more extensively in colloquial dialects. It refers to the doer of the action of to one involved in the action, e.g. the active participle…
Word formation in Arabic Posted by aziza on Jun 22, 2009
Morphology or word formation is a very powerful concept in Arabic, and if a learner knows the word-formation rules in Arabic, he/she will find it very helpful in their future learning. Arabic is a highly derivational language, i.e. you can make words from the same root by using different forms. In English, for example, we…
Ordinal numbers in Arabic Posted by aziza on Jun 18, 2009
Ordinal numbers, like first, second, third, etc. are used to mention the rank or order of things. They are derived from the numbers, and in most of the instances follow the pattern of (فاعل), e.g. ثالث, رابع, خامس, etc. When they are used as adjectives, they must agree with the noun they modify in gender and…
Question words in Arabic Posted by aziza on Jun 12, 2009
In Modern Standard Arabic, questions begin with question words. However, in some colloquial dialects like Egyptian, question words often appear at the end of the sentence, e.g. what is your name? in MSA (ما اسمك؟), and in ECA (اسمك إيه؟). It is interesting to note also that question words differ from standard and colloquial and…
Even more on numbers and agreement in Arabic Posted by aziza on May 29, 2009
In this post, I continue to explain rules related to numbers and their specification(التمييز). I deal specifically with a very confusing set of numbers, i.e. between 11 and 99. Although it is very easy to form the specification for this set of numbers, gender agreement can be a challenging aspect. When we talk…
More on numbers and agreement in Arabic Posted by aziza on May 25, 2009
When we talk about a number of things, e.g. five cars or seven friends, we need to use the appropriate form of the number and the appropriate noun to follow. The noun that follows numbers is called specification (التمييز). It is an indefinite noun that follows a number to specify what the number refers to. It has…
The Genitive Case in Arabic Posted by aziza on May 20, 2009
The genitive case(حالة الجر) is the case of nouns that occur after prepositions or as second word in idafa constructions, and their modifying adjectives. Nouns and adjectives that are genitive are called (المجرور) in Arabic. There are various endings used to mark the genitive case; depending on the number, gender and definiteness of the noun…