Tag Archives: passive
Active and Passive in Arabic: Practice and Examples Posted by Ibnulyemen اِبْنُ اليَمَن 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…
Changing an Active Sentence to Passive in Arabic Posted by Ibnulyemen اِبْنُ اليَمَن 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…
The Verbal Sentence (Part 7) : The Passive Verb Gender Posted by Fisal on Jul 23, 2014
Ahlan, Arabic fans! I know Arabic grammar is giving you some headache especially about the gender of (passive) verbs that must agree in number and gender with the subject or the deputy agent in passive sentences. Such headache does exist in all languages and Arabic is no exception. In the process of learning…
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…