Morphology

السلام عليكم

Let’s take a look at something else related to the science of  صرف (sarf), which deals with how words derive from each other.  Today we’re going to cover how to conjugate verbs in the past tense.  Let’s take a very common root and go from there:

ذ-ه-ب

If you look it up in a dictionary like Hans-Wehr, you’ll see that it means “to go” and it will give you how to say it in the past for the “he” form:

 

Below is the full conjugation of this root in the past tense.  Each form represents a different doer.  Don’t worry about memorizing for now.  My advice is to just focus in the beginning on understanding the rules.  You’ll wind up internalizing them as you continue your reading anyway.  One important thing to note is that when we conjugate in the past tense, we never touch the beginning; we always change just the end only.  This is different from when we added a letter at the beginning in Conjugating present tense verbs

 

Plural	Dual	Single	Gender	Case
ذَهَبُوْا They all went	ذَهَبَا They both went	ذَهَبَ He went	Male	3rd person
ذَهَبْنَ They (f.) all went	ذَهَبَتَا They (f.) both went	ذَهَبَتْ She went	Female
ذَهَبْتُمْ You all went	ذَهَبْتُمَا You both went	ذَهَبْتَ You went	Male	2nd person
ذَهَبْتُنَّ You(f.) all went	ذَهَبْتُما You(f.) both went	ذَهَبْتِ You(f.) went	Female
ذَهَبْنَا We went		ذَهَبْتُ I went	Male	1st person
			Female

 

Summary

To summarize, the pronouns for the doer that you can see at the end of a past tense verb are:

Pronoun added	Doer represented
Base form (nothing added)	He – هُوَ
ا	They both – هُما
وْا	They all – هُمْ
تْ	She – هِيَ
تَا	They (f.) both – هُما
نَ	They (f.) all – هُنَّ
تَ	You – أَنْتَ
تُما	You both – أَنْتُما
تُمْ	You all – أَنْتُمْ
تِ	You (f.) – أَنْتِ
تُما	You (f.) both – أَنْتُما
تُنَّ	You (f.) all – أَنْتُنَّ
تُ	I – أَنا
نا	We – نَحْنُ

[Read more…] about Conjugating past tense verbs

السلام عليكم

Let’s take a look at something related to the science of  صرف (sarf), which is often translated as “morphology”, which deals with how words derive from each other.  This is a really powerful branch of Arabic studies, because once you know a single root stem (which is usually three letters), you’ll automatically know how to express more than a hundred meanings just by feeding a root into the sarf machine.  For now, we’re just going to talk about how other words are derived from a mudari’ (present tense) verb.   Let’s take a very common root and go from there.

ذ-ه-ب

If you look it up in a dictionary like Hans-Wehr, you’ll see that it means “to go” and it will give you how to say it in the past for the “he” form:

From this, we know that ذَهَبَ means “he went” and يَذْهَبُ means “he goes”.  We’re not going to deal with how to convert from past tense to present tense because we’re just concerned with what do once you have the base form for the present.

The present tense verb with nothing attached to the end

So what we have now is يَذْهَبُ, the most basic present tense verb you can get.  In other posts in this blog you’ll see it being called as “a present tense verb with nothing attached to the end”, and that’s exactly what is is because we didn’t add anything to the end.  All we did was add a letter to the beginning of the word to show that is for the present tense and change the vowels.  The form that’s used for “he” is the base, and all the other forms come out from that one.

Now, I want to show you something cool that you can do when you know the base form of the present tense…

Flipping the first letter

Once you have the base form of a verb (“he”), you automatically know how to say  it for “you”, “she”, “I” and “we”, just by flipping the first letter.  Look at what I mean.

He goes – yadh-habu	يَذْهَبُ
You go – tadh-habu	تَذْهَبُ
She goes – tadh-habu	تَذْهَبُ
I go – adh-habu	أذْهَبُ
We go – nadh-habu	نَذْهَبُ

That’s it.  Just by switching the first letter between  ي (yaa), ت (taa), أ (hamzah) and ن (nun) you can change the meaning.  Also, one of the quirks of the Arabic language is the ت is used for both the feminine and the 2nd person (i.e when you’re talking to someone).  You know which one is meant by the context.

In fact, anytime you’re dealing with a present verb, one of these four letters (ي-ت-أ-ن) must be at the front.  So if you see one of these at the beginning, there’s a good chance you’re looking at something that is talking about the present tense.

[Read more…] about Conjugating present tense verbs