Introduction to words in Arabic – اللَّفْظُ

This week we initiated our learning with the two cornerstones of Arabic grammar: النّحو (syntax) and الصّرف (morphology). But what makes these two concepts so important to Arabic? Before we go into this let’s complete the final topic in writing Arabic which concerns the sun and moon letters – this is really importantly not only for writing but very much so for reading. In fact, you’ll find that the better you get at writing correctly in Arabic (with all the rules), the better and more fluent reader you’ll become.

الحُروفُ الْقَمَرِيَّة (Moon letters) and الحُرُوفُ الشّمْسِيَّة  (sun letters) are concerned with the pronunciation of the ‘ل’ in the ‘ال’ within a noun (only nouns will have ال). The letters of the Arabic alphabet are categorized as either الحُروفُ الْقَمَرِيَّة or الحُرُوفُ الشّمْسِيَّة. If you have a moon letter (ا ب ج ح خ ع غ ف ق ك م  و ه ي) after the ال in a word then you DO pronounce the ل in a noun with ال. However, if you have a sun letter (ت ث د  ذ رزس ش ص ض  ط ظ ل ن) you then you DO NOT pronounce the ل. In sum: moon letter = الْ and sun letter = ال + letter with tashdeed

---

Right! Let’s move on to the cruxes of the Arabic language.

The science of النّحُو (notice how we didn’t pronounce the ل here because ن is a sun letter!) is concerned with knowing: (1) how to read, write and speak in Arabic; in particular it involves joining verbs, nouns and particles together to produce phrase/sentences. (2) It also focuses on recognizing the ‘state’ of a word by analyzing its final letter.

“It is said that knowledge makes a person heady like an untamed horse and because of this we need to keep ourselves focused. The more we learn, the more we realise how much we really do not know.  Take for example a fruit bearing tree versus a fruitless tree; the former has low and weighted down branches whereas the latter has high branches. We as students of knowledge, aim to be a fruit-bearing tree; with depth and humility.”

Sorry, tangent – that was today’s gem from class.

So, back to النَّحُو (syntax). As mentioned there are two key purposes of النّحُو: to read, write and speak in Arabic and also to identify the state of a word by looking at its ending. It’s crucial to know the names of some key grammatical words before we get any further and also where they are placed in a hierarchy of grammatical constructs/components.

In Arabic we have utterances, which are meaningful and with no meaning. The meaningful utterances, are of two kinds: singular and combined. Singular, meaningful utterances, are of further 3 kinds: nouns, verbs and particles (e.g. prepositions). This is more clearly exemplified in the diagram below with the respective arabic terms: (I’ve not added the English in so we become more familiarized with the Arabic terms and the chart corresponds with the sequence in the explanation, it’s easy you’ll work it out!)

Nouns الأَسْماء have a specific meaning but no tense.

Verbs الْفِعْلُ also have specific meaning and tense.

Particles الْحَرْفُ have no tense and no specific meaning on its own.

---

Now for the cases/states/forms/conditions, we’ll use the word case from now. When we look at the case of a word; we are referring to its positioning grammatically; it is a subject? object? etc) and this gives us abundance in meaning as we will find out at a later. There are three cases (الإِعْرَاب) for nouns in the Arabic language:(1) الرَّفْعُ – (Ar-raf’)(2) النَّصْبُ – (An-nasb)(3) الْجَرُّ – (Al-Jarr). So how do you know which case the word is in? Some cases are recognized through diacritics (harakah) and others by letters (at the end of a word). We are going to start building a table which documents the different ways we can tell the case of a word:

If this table seems a bit complicated right now then just take form it this:

In a verb sentence we have three main components: subject (doer), verb (action-doing word) and maybe an object(done to). We may also have prepositions (in, on, from). In Arabic the sequence is verb-subject-object. If a word has any symbols from the raf’ row then it is the subject. If a word has any symbols from the nasb row it is the object. If the word has any symbols from the jarr row then it is a particle. Work on this sentence and identify the parts:

دَخَلَ زَيْدٌ فِيْ الدّارِ

Comment below with what you think the answers are and I’ll put up the answers straight-after, God-willing.

OK fellow learners – there’s more, but we’ll end it here for this post.

Ma’salaam!

Arabic gem of the week: Letters in Arabic are treated as feminine. Also alif without a harakat is always in a state of sukoon so we don’t need to put symbol on, ergo – alif saakinah.