The verb sentence in Arabic, known as الجُمْلَة الفِعْلِيَّة, is another type of sentence which starts with a verb فِعْل.
What is a فِعْل? It’s a word which can express tense and meaning on its own. A verb can be masculine or feminine. It can express itself in different numbers, singular, dual, plural. It does not however express definiteness. This is because only a noun can take an ال or تَنْوِيْن. Therefore when you see an Arabic word with one of these two signs you can take a pretty confident guess that it’s a noun. This is essentially how you identify words in Arabic.
A فِعْل is a sentence on its own because an Arabic verb always consists of two components: فِعْل and a doer فاعِل. Any verb always has an inside فَاعِل in the form of a pronoun but it can also have an outside فَاعِل in the form of a noun which overrides the inside doer. If we have an outside فَاعِل in the form of a noun, we now then have situation of words coming together to form a construct, a sentence. Therefore there will be specific grammar rules for the components within this verb sentence and we have to refer to GNCD.
The grammar rules for the verb and فَاعِل are as follows:
G-ender: The verb and فَاعِل always have to agree in gender
N-umber: The verb must remain singular in the third person whilst it has an outside doer. If it is referring anaphorically to an aforementioned فَاعِل then it can inflect to dual and plural to reflect the number of the doer(s). It does not require an outside فَاعِل in the second or first person.
C-ase: The verb can be in any case unless indeclinable (refer to this post on the cases of verbs) but the فَاعِل always has to be مَرْفُوْع
D-efiniteness: not applicable
There are two other components which you may find with a فِعْل and فَاعِل and that is an object مَفْعُوْل بِهِ (there are 5 common types) and/or a prepositional phrase الجَار والمَجْرُور (remember a particle cannot express meaning on its own and therefore needs to connect with a verb or noun to do so). The مَفْعُوْل بِهِ is always nasb and does not need to match with the verb in gender or number. More in objects in the next post.
Examples:
The boy ate the apple:
َأَكَلَ الوَلَدُ الفَاكِهَةَ
The girl went to school
ذَهَبَتْ البْنْتُ الى المَدْرَسَةِ
Hussain reads books at night
قَرَأَ حُسَيْنٌ كُتُبًا فِيْ اللَّيْلِ
Try the following sentences:
Zayd went home
Ayesha played football
Halima ran to the mosque
Habib cooked the chicken
The men went to the school
Find the answers in the next post on plurals
Vocab:
Home: المَنْزِل
Played: كُرَةُ القَدَمِ
Ran: رَكَضَ
Cooked: طَبَخَ
Chicken: الدَّجاجة
Men: الرِّجَال
School: المَدْرَسَة
Ma’salaam
Logicalwayfarer 