Tag Archives: Conditionals
More words in combination or not? Posted by aziza on Apr 22, 2011
I got an interesting question from Juan about the word (لمّا) which means ‘when’, and he asked whether it involves a combination of (ما) with another word, the answer is ‘possibly’! I do not know for sure because I do not know the etymology, i.e. origin of the word, but it is likely for a…
Connectors in Arabic – Condition Posted by aziza on Sep 25, 2010
It is very important when we write in any language to create logical relationships between the ideas that we present. There is a number of relationships that we can create like addition, contrast, among others, and there are many words and expressions that we can use to express these relationships. In this post, I present…
Arabic Conditionals: Whenever and Wherever Posted by aziza on Dec 15, 2009
There are some particles which are generally regarded as conditionals, e.g. (لمَّا) and (كلَّما). However, they express a temporal relationship rather than a condition. There are still 2 actions that are related to each other by a temporal relationship, for example: لمَّا سافرَ أخي، سافرتُ معه. “When my brother traveled, I traveled with him.” كلَّماسافرَ…
Arabic Conditionals: Who, What, When, and Where Posted by aziza on Dec 12, 2009
In this post, I explain 4 more conditionals in Arabic, more specifically (مَنْ) “who”, (ما) “what”, (متى) “when”, and (أين) “where”. As explained earlier, conditionals are used with 2 actions; one of them depends on the other. Therefore, there must be 2 embedded verbal sentences in each conditional sentence. With (مَنْ) and (ما), both the…
Arabic Conditionals Using If Posted by aziza on Dec 3, 2009
Conditional sentences are made up of 2 parts or 2 sentences, one of them contains a particle for condition (أداة الشرط), and this sentence is called (جملة الشرط). The other one provides the outcome of the condition, and it is called (جواب الشرط). The most common type of conditional in English involves ‘if’. There are…