Part 1 – Back to the Basics
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A sound plural is a suffix which is added to the end of the word in order to indicate the plural. The suffixes reflect gender and case as well. First we will deal with masculine sound plurals and then with feminine ones. Masculine sound plurals have the suffix ونَ attached to them in order…
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In Chapter One we briefly discussed what is known as the “pausal form“. We noted that the case endings of words at the end of a sentence, or any other natural pause, are usually not pronounced. There is one exception to this. If the word in question is in the accusative case with the alif…
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We have covered so far two of the three cases in Arabic. Now we come to the last case, the accusative. The accusative is primarily used for the direct object of the verb but appears in other situations as well. These other situations will be discussed in other parts of this book. The information on…
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Arabic uses pronoun suffixes as another way to indicate possession. In English we say “my house,” “his house,” etc., to indicate that something belongs to someone. In Arabic the same thing is done but the possessive pronouns are suffixed to the noun instead of written as independent words before the noun. Below is a chart…
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The nisba adjective is the “relative” adjective in Arabic. It is often used with place names. For example, a man from Baghdad can be referred to as بغدادي What we have done is we have added the suffix يّ ( the letter ي with a shadda) to the name of the city. Thus a male…
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You have so far dealt with sentences such as هذا كتابٌ جديدٌ “This is a new book”, and هذا الكتابُ جديدٌ “This book is new.” How would you say “This is the new book”? The answer is هذا هو الكتابُ الجديُد. What has happened is that the pronoun هو has been inserted between هذا and…
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Up until now we have worked with sentences such as: هذا كتابٌ. هذا الكتابُ جديدٌ. كتابُ المدرسِ جديدٌ. The sentences you have learned to deal with have grown a little in complexity. However, you have not yet studied how to modify a noun with an adjective. In this section of this lesson you will…
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The idaafa is an extremely important construction in Arabic. It is very easy, basic, and ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL for any student of the language who wants ever to be able to do anything at all in Arabic. I am upset about the number of students who have had several years of Arabic and do not know…
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Prepositions are words like في ,ب , ل , الى , عن and من In addition, there are large number of words, which, while they are not technically prepositions as understood by Arab grammarians, function as prepositions. These are words such as قبْلَ,بَعْدَ and أثْناءَ . Whenever you see any of these words you will…
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The genitive case occurs in Arabic in two situations. Both of these situations occur very often in the language. First, a noun or adjective following a preposition will always be in the genitive. The only other time the genitive occurs is if a word is the second or later term of an idaafa. (The idaafa…