Category: الدرس الخامس: بغداد

GRAMMAR  NOTE  1  الماضي ‘The Perfect Tense’

The Perfect Tense may have the following meanings and functions:

1. a. It expresses a completed action, an Event,  as in a narrative—it answers the question, What happened?  What took place? Here are some examples from the Basic  Text of Lesson 1 (for other examples look in lessons 6 and  11, which are narratives):

جلس ‘he sat down’

قام الى اهله ‘he (up and) went to his family’

سألوه ‘they asked him’

تمّ الزواج ‘the marriage took place/was performed’

انتظر ساعة ‘he waited for an hour’

خرجت من المطبخ ‘she came out of the kitchen’

This of course includes negative perfects as well, which are mostly expressed with لم, like:

لم يستطعْ    ‘He found himself incapable of, he was unable (at that point) to’

If you take all the perfect tense verbs in main clauses out of a narrative and string them together you will have a skeleton of the plot.

Here the English verb and the Arabic verb are in contrast: The English past tense can denote either a single event (“he ate with us yesterday”) or a past custom or condition (“he always ate alone”),  whereas the Arabic verb can only denote an event (تغدى معنا البارحة). Compare:

I wrote my parents a letter last Sunday about my new job.

“I wrote” = an event = perfect tense: كتبتُ                     and

I wrote my parents a letter every Sunday when I was in college.

“I wrote” = customary activity = past imperfect: كنت أكتبُ

b. A perfect may also express an event whose results are still in effect, where English uses the present perfect tense:

هل ركبت جَمَلاً؟                                    Have you ridden a camel?

لم ارَ في حياتي امرأة بمثل هذا الجمال.            I have never in my life seen a woman of such beauty.

لم ازر شيكاغو حتى الآن.                          I haven’t visited Chicago as of now.

لم تنسَه في حياتها.           She hasn’t forgotten him all her life,

This applies in the case of verbs of motion (‘to come, to go’):

جئتُ للحصول على شهادة.       I have come to get a degree.                       

• The perfect is used as optative to express a wish (positive or negative), blessings, prayers, or curses, and is equal to English “would that…”, “may [such-and-such happen]”, as in:

باركَكَ الله                                              ‘(May) God bless you!’

والدي، رحمه الله …                       My father, God rest his soul …

كفانا الله شرَّه              ‘May God protect us from the harm he will bring’.

قاتله الله                                              (lit. May God fight him! Damn him!)

لعنهم الله                                             (lit. May God curse him! Damn him!

In this usage the perfect is negated by لا, as in

لا سمح الله                                            ‘Heaven forbid!’ 

It is worth mentioning that in more recent Standard Arabic the use of the imperfect with optative meaning, following colloquial usage, shows up more and more in writing.

الله يلعن الشيطان!                                   (lit. May God curse the devil!

الله يُكرمُك!                (lit. May God honor you! May God be gracious to you?

3. Verbs that make a declaration— effecting changes in the formal or official status of a person or thing, referred to as performative verbs–are usually in the perfect tense, and may be passive. They carry the meaning of “consider it done”.

(In English they are usually first person singular or plural present tense. A minister might say “I pronounce you husband and wife”, at which point the couple is officially married). Here are examples:

فصلناك من اللجنة.                     we (hereby) fire you from the committee.’

اتّفَقْنا.ا                             ‘We (herewith) agree.’ ‘Agreed! It’s a deal’

قُبلَت الاستقالةُ. ُ                   ‘The resignation is (hereby) accepted’.

زوّجتك إيّاها.            (said at a Muslim wedding) You are hereby married.

Notice that English often has “hereby” when using such verbs.

Verbal derivatives may also carry performative force, as with انا شاكرٌ لك ‘I am grateful to you, I thank you’ and شكراً ‘thanks’.

For review, note that in Arabic the imperfect tense is the tense used with:

• verbs that make assertions, committing the speaker to a particular stand or belief,:

اعترف بعدالة القضية.            ‘I acknowledge the justice of the cause’

• verbs used  as directives, causing the hearer to do something:

 اتحدّاك ان تعيدَ ذلك ‘I dare you to do that again’

and(iii)  verbs of expression, expressing the speaker’s psychological state regarding the issue at hand: اعْتَذِر ‘I apologize’ and  اشْكُرُك  ‘I thank you.’

4. The Perfect also has a present (and future in some cases) meaning with verbs of  understanding, knowing, liking, thinking:

أفهمت ما أقوله؟                                     Do you understand what I say.

نعم فهمت.                                           Yes, I do.

5. In subordinate clauses which follow verbs in the perfect, perfect may mean past perfect:

بعد انْ غادرت فكّرت مَلِيّاً في السؤال الذي وجّهته اليّ

After I left, I thought for a long time about the question he had addressed to me.

          (ii) The perfect tense in a subordinate clause retains its basic meaning of a completed event but the timing will depend on the type of subordinate clause it is in–a relative clause, where it will often refers to past time, or a conditional clause where it probably refers to present time, etc.

This may have been covered in an earlier note, but if so, it bears repeating.

6. In conditional sentences the verb in both the conditioning clause and the result clause are mostly  in the perfect with mostly a present or future meaning:

1.  in real, possible conditions with اذا، إن, the verb that follows is in the perfect , while in contrary to fact and hypothetical conditions with لو   conditioning clauses may be either both perfect or both jussive, with the perfect having a present or future meaning.

2. This is also the case with the perfect in temporal clauses withا  اذ  meaning ‘when’ and اذا ما  ‘whenever’ which have a present or future meaning.

• With the indefinite relative pronouns مَن ‘who, whoever’ ما  ‘what, whatever’, where both the main and the subordinate clauses are either perfect or jussive:

الله معك في كلّ ما قابلت من صعوبات             May God be with you in all the difficulties you meet.                      

من شبّ على شيء شاب عليه                      The way you grow up is the way you grow old.

افعلوا ما شئتم/كما شئنم

d.   after adverbs followed by the indefinite particle ما  like اينما  كُلَّما حيثما مهما متى ما  (see lesson 3 Lexical note 2)

   في اي وقت شاء   The perfect verb شاء   ‘is used in this expression in the place of the imperfect to give the verb the character of definiteness by implying that it has already been exercised’. The imperfect may also be used here.

A NOTE ON  لم يمضِ ‘(time) did not pass’: The Jussive of Defective Verbs.

Defective verbsالفعل المُعْتَلّ الآخِر/ are probably the trickiest of all to conjugate and nowhere more so than in the jussive mood/المضارع المجزوم,   Here is a brief reminder of how it goes.

First, the jussive mood/الفعل المجزوم of sound verbs is formed by deleting the short vowel ـَ a on any subjunctive form unless it is part of the inflection نَ , the feminine plural ending; to re-phrase it, change فتحة to سكون except on feminine plural forms of the subjunctive.   To illustrate first with the sound verb كتب – يكتب ‘to write’ and then with three defective verbs (only the affected forms are given):

Strong Verb: كتب – يكتبُ ‘to write’

 Jussive                                 –  Subjunctive                     

لم اكتبْ  ‘I did not write’       أنْ اكتبَ  – ‘that I write’             

لم تكتبْ  ‘you did not write’  تكتبَ  – أنْ ‘that you write’                                                                   لم يكتبْ  ‘he did not write’    يكتبَ  – أنْ ‘that he write’

لم نكتبْ  ‘we did not write’   أنْ نكتبَ  – ‘that we write’

Defective verbs:     

Jussive                                  –  Subjunctive

لم ادعُ ‘I did not call’            –  أنْ ادعوَ  ‘that I call’ 

لم ابقَ ‘I did not stay’           –    ان ابقى  ‘that I stay’     

لم امضِ ‘I did not continue’ –  ان امضيَ ‘that I continue’ 

The jussive of defective verbs is formed by shortening the long vowel of the subjunctive stem: ى aa becomesـَ  a, ي ii becomes  ـِi and و uu becomes ـ ـُu.  This involves dropping a letter in each case, leaving only a vowel sign/حركة. Defective verbs, exemplified here by دعا – يدعو ‘to call’ and مضى – يمضي ‘to continue on’, thus have long vowels in the imperfect indicative and subjunctive but, following this rule, lose the long vowel in the jussive. With a fully-voweled text this is no problem, since the حركات are visible, but most all texts are unvoweled and this can be a problem.  Suppose you come across لم يمت in a text–how do you read it?  Well, how can you read it?  You have to know that يمت could be based on a doubled root, as in لم يمُتَّ ‘he did not spread (s.th.)’, or on a hollow root, لم يمُتْ ‘he did not die’ or a defective root,لم يمْت  which doesn’t exist. 

When you come across a very short verb form in the imperfect tense in a context that requires or permits the jussive mood, then you proceed through a similar process of elimination.

And while we are at it, remember that with hollow verbs   الفعل الأجْوّف/verb forms with no suffixes shorten the long vowel in the jussive as in  

Jussive                                  –  Nominative

لم اقُلْ ‘I did not l’                     أقولُ‘I say’ 

لم أكَدْ ‘no sooner had I …’         أكادُ  ‘I almost …’     

لم أنَمْ                               أنامُ  ‘I sleep’

لم أسِرْ                             أسيرُ ‘I walk’

 افعال تأخذ مفعولين أصلهما مبتدأ وخبر 2..  ‘Verbs with two Objects in a relationship of subject and predicate  

In lesson 4 we discussed  a class of verbs with two Object Complements: Causatives of transitive verbs with one object, and Verbs with the specific meaning of giving. In this lesson we will discuss another class of verbs with two Object Complements,  verbs  whose two object complements stand to one another in a relationship of subject and predicate.  These are also of two kinds:

1. Verbs whose two objects are nouns that bear to each other a true equational relationship (i.e. one where the first equals and “is” the second). These include (i) verbs like لقّـّب  ‘name, surname (or nickname)’, دعا   ‘name’,  سمّى   ‘name, call’, whose second object may alternately take the preposition  ب  and (ii) verbs like  عيّن  ‘appoint’, اختار  ‘choose, select’,  اتّخذ   ‘single out, adopt, take s.o. for’, انتخب ‘elect’, whose second object may alternately take the preposition ك ‘as’.

Here the order is always first object followed by second, and only the first may be pronominalized and only the first can become the subject of the passive verb. Here are examples:

سَمّوْا ابنَتـَهم الكبرى فاطمة َ/سَمّوْها بفاطمة           They called their eldest daughter/her Fatima.

سُمِّيَت فاطمة َ/ بفاطمة                                        She was called Fatima.

لُقـِّب( بـ)أمير البحار         He was surnamed ‘the admiral’.

انتخبوا رئيس حزب اليمين رئيساً للوزراء/           They elected the head of the party of the   right prime minister.

انتخبوه رئيساً للوزراء/اُنْتُخِب رئيساً للوزراء        They elected him prime minister/He was elected prime minister.

عُيـِّنت ثاتشر سفيرة ً/كسفيرةً لبلادها في غانا        Thatcher was appointed her country’s embassador to Ghana.          

2. Verbs that take aمصدر مؤوّل  ‘noun  clause with  أنّ ’ as their object but can also occur without  أنّ ,  where the subject after أنّ serves as first object المفعول الأوّل,  and the predicate as second object المفعول الثاني  . The first object is always a noun (or pronoun) and is in the accusative, and the second can be a noun, adjective, or participle, in which case it takes the accusative marker, a prepositional phrase, or a verb (in both الماضي  and  المضارع المرفوع) . Such verbs as ظنّ ‘think’, رأى ‘see, perceive, deem’ ,  عرف ‘know/recognize s.o./s.th. to be, حسِب ‘reckon, consider, deem, assume’, اعتبر ‘consider’,  زعم  ‘regard, take s.o. for or to be, claim’, تصوّر ‘imagine’ , خال ‘imagine, consider, deem s.o. to be’, وجد  ‘ find s.o. or s.th. to be’, mean mostly knowing, having or leaning towards an opinion, considering, believing, and are known as افعال القلوب  ‘verbs of the heart’ (heart here refers to the mind and the intellect and not to emotions or feelings).

ظننتُ الحبَّ قائماً بينهما     I thought love existed between them.

حسِبتُ العلم كنزاً لا يفنى      I reckoned knowledge to be a lasting treasure.

وجدناه أهلا للاحترام والثناء     We found him to be worthy of respect and praise.

Here again the order is always first object followed by the second, and only the first may be pronominalized and become the subject of the passive verb.

Some remarks

Here again, it is important to have the following comments in mind as we consider, study, and try to retain and use these verbs.

but not

اعتقدها قاسية القلب*         I believe her to be (lit.her) hard hearted.

On the other hand, we also have a verb of this same semantic class, عدّ ‘consider, regard, think’ which is not normally used with   .أنّSo we have:   

عددتموه واحداً من أقرب الأصدقاء.                     You considered him one of your closest friends.

but not,

*عددتم  انّه  واحدا من أقرب الأصدقاء               

b. Some of the verbs of this subclass may have different meanings in different contexts. Thus, the verbs  رأى and  وجد  with أنّ refer to mental activities and are acts of the mind, such as deeming and finding ‘s.o. or s.th to be …’, respectively  ; without أنّ they may may have the meaning of افعال القلوب  , but it may refer to the organs of sense as افعال الحَسّ ‘verbs of the sense’, and mean ‘see with the eyes’, or ‘come across, hit upon’, respectively. In the latter case, the second complement after the first object is not a second object but a  حال. The line of demarcation is much clearer in the case of the verb سَمِع  , which is preponderantly a verb of the heart with أنّ ‘learn, be told’ but a verb of sense ‘hear (with the ears)’, without أنّ. With other verbs it is more difficult sometimes to tell a second object from a حال . Much depends on the context and whether the second construction lends itself to such an interpretation; it is a second object for sure, when it is clear that the first object is or is taken to be the second. Thus,

ظننتُه صديقاً لى/يعرف العربية/قد ترك وظيفته              I thought him to be a friend of mine/him to be one who knows Arabic/he had left his job.

Compare this sentence with:

عرفته قاضياً عادلاً           I knew him to be a fair judge or

I knew him as (at a  time when he was) a fair judge.

رأيتهم لا يعرفون للحريّة معنىً        I perceived them to be people who did not know the meaning of freedom.

c. As you know several of these verbs can do without a second object:

علمت القضيّة             I got to know the problem.

d. With some of these verbs, the first object and the subject of the verb may be identical, but only if both are 1s., in which case the first object has the meaning ‘myself’:

رأيتُني أتخبّط.           I saw me (myself) wandering about, lost.

e. Once again here, what we said about these verbs and their government applies to their derivatives:  مصدر ‘verbal nouns’ and  اسم الفاعل واسم المفعول ‘active and passive participles’, (wherever these have not taken on the meaning and usage of  nouns, of course.

انا مُصرّ على اعتبار  أخيك قائداً مثاليّا.               I insist on considering your brother a model leader.

لم أقل شيئاً مُعتبرا السكوتَ أفضلَ من الكلام.        I said nothing, considering silence better than talking.

f. In the passive, it is the whole clause with أنّ or the first object, i.e.when the verb is used without أنّ  , that becomes the subject of the passive verb.

وُجِدتم أهلا للاحترام والثناء. You were found him worthy of respect and praise.

عُرِف قاضياً عادلاً.         He was known to be a fair judge or

He was known as (when he was) a fair judge.

g. Finally these verbs with two objects are to be distinguished from verbs that take two accusatives, but their two complements do not stand to each other in any of the relationships we described here or in lesson 4. Such verbs, like زاد   ‘add to, increase’, take an object and a complement in the accusative that answers the question ‘with respect to what, in terms of what’ (called   تَمْييز in Arabic, to be discussed in lesson 7). Here is the example we find in this lesson:

ممّا زادها (مدينة بغداد) جمالا ً حدائقها.               What has added to its beauty …(lit. what has increased it in beauty)                                   

Once again, an earlier statement with respect to differences in the meaning and usage of various verbs bears repeating: only the use of a dictionary, careful study, practice, patient learning, frequent use and extensive exposure can teach the learner of a foreign language, any foreign language, and help him or her retain these details.

3.The Passive Participle/الاسم المفعول.  In the previous lesson we discussed active participles; it would be well now to have a glance at passive participles, first the forms and then their usages.

Form I verbs are the most basic forms of verbs in Arabic, and the derived verb conjugations are built on them.  For example, Form I verb وضُحَ ‘to be clear’ can be put into the causative Form II verb وضّح to mean “to cause to be clear, make clear, clarify, explain’.  Form I active participles have their own private shapes different from those of the derived Forms.  The Form I active participle pattern is فاعِلٌ and its variants, as you know, and the passive pattern is مَفْعولً, as in فاعل ‘making’ and مفعول ‘made’ from فعل – يفعل ‘to do, make’.

The rule for forming all the derived verb participles goes like this, illustrated by Form II قدّم ‘to present; to offer’, Form VI تناوَل ‘to reach for and take’ and VIII انتخب ‘to elect’:

0: Imperfect indicative:                  يقدِّم                 يتناوَل                ينتخِب                                                                                                                                           1. Select the imperfect stem:       -قدِّم                      -تناوَل               نتخِب –                          

2. Prefix مُ-:                                      مُقدِّم                 متناوَل                منتخِب                                       

3. Change the stem vowel where necessary           

            for the active to i:            مُقدِمٌ’presenting’ متناوِل ‘taking up’    منتخِب   ‘electing’                                                                 

            for the passive to a:        مُقدَم  ‘presented’ متناوَل  ‘taken up’       منتخَب ‘elected’

The meaning of the passive participle is “having undergone )the action of the verb(” or “having been put into  or assumed (the state or quality denoted by the verb)”; the technical term for this meaning is patient, one who has suffered or undergone the action of the verb. Thus the underlying meaning of مقدَّم is ‘having been presented’, of متناوَل is ‘having been taken’, and of منتخَب is ‘having been elected’.

The passive participles of verb-preposition idioms retain the preposition to specify the meaning of the phrase; the structure is illustrated by the following phrase based on وَثِقَ – يَثِقُ بِ ‘to trust, have confidence in’:

 دراسةٌ موثوقٌ بها ‘a trustworthy/reliable study’

Here the past participle itself is invariable–it is always masculine singular, while the pronoun object of the preposition is what agrees with the modified noun.  Here are two more examples:

القوانين المعمول بها ‘the laws on the basis of which (governments) have been operating’

 علمه وجهده غير مرغوبٍ فيهما في وطنه الام’his education and efforts are not favored in his mother country’

A secondary meaning of the passive is potentiality of action; for example, مأكول can mean either ‘(having been) eaten’ or ‘edible’ and مقبول can mean ‘accepted’ or ‘acceptable’. This feature is found in the verb as well, where the passive can have potential meaning, as in شيء لا يُصَدَّقُ ‘something unbelievable (“not to be believed”)’ and لم يحدثْ شيءٌ يُذْكَرُ ‘Nothing remarkable happened.’

Finally, some passive participles develop fixed meanings and become nouns, taking the plural patterns that nouns rather than adjectives take, like مكتوب ‘message, note’ (“that which has been written”) with its plural مكاتيبُ and مفهومٌ – مفاهيمُ ‘notion-s, concept-s’. The word معلوم is interesting: as a passive participle it means “known”; as a noun it means “fee; duty, tax” (Tunisia), and with the feminine suffix, معلومة, it means ‘a known or given fact, a piece of information’ with the regular plural معلومات meaning ‘knowledge, information; data’.

Derived passive participles may also mean noun of place, like مخيَّم ‘camping ground, camp’ from خيَّم ‘to pitch tent, encamp’ and مُستشفىً ‘hospital’ from استشفى ‘to seek a cure’.  In this usage the derived passive participles differ from basic Form I verbs, which have the special pattern مفعلة/مَفعَل (or مفغِل with most verbs whose imperfect stem vowel in ـِ i). The plural of all of these patterns is مَفاعِلُ.

مكتبٌ – مكاتِبُ ‘office-s’ from كتب – يكتُب ‘to write’

مدرسةٌ – مدارسُ ‘school-s’ from  درس – يدرُس ‘to study’

مجلِسٌ – مجالسُ ‘seat; session; council’ from جَلَسَ – يجلِس ‘to sit down’

مقهىً – مقاهٍ from the root of the noun قهْوة