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Active and Passive in Arabic: Practice and Examples Posted by on Jul 31, 2018

In the previous post, you learned about the passive voice المَبْنِي لِلْمَجْهُول in Arabic, and how an active مَعْلُوم sentence is changed into passive مَجْهُول. Besides leaving some words out from the active sentence, verbal internal (i.e. non-final) diacritical marks or short vowels must change. This is essentially the most obvious change in verb forms…

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Changing an Active Sentence to Passive in Arabic Posted by on Jul 24, 2018

To a change an Arabic sentence from active مَعْلُوم to passive مَجْهُول, its verb must be transitive مُتَعَدِّي. That is, it must have at least one object مَفْعُول. The sentence that includes an intransitive لَازِم or non-conjugatable جَامِد verbs cannot be changed into passive. This post is about why passive is used in Arabic, and…

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Passive in Arabic – part 2 Posted by 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…

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