Tag Archives: Arabic grammar
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…