2.3 Form I: The Plain Verb — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read the plain verb of any root and say that it is form I, the shape all the other forms are measured against. Hear that كَتَبَ , شَرِبَ and كَبُرَ have the same three consonant slots and differ only in one short vowel. Say which of the three middle vowels a verb takes, and why no rule will tell you: it is a fact about the word, like the principal parts of a Latin verb. Read a two-word sentence in which the verb comes first, such as جَلَسَ الْجَمِيع , and say who did what. Use the dictionary convention by which كَتَبَ is the entry for the whole family, and explain why an Arabic dictionary has no infinitive to list. Prerequisites : 2.2 and the names of the shapes Everything so far has been a noun. The family of the first root gave you a book, a writer, a desk and a library; the second gave you a lesson, a school and a teacher. But the field of meaning of a root is almost always an action, and the word that names that action most plainly is a verb. This lesson is about that verb, and it is short because the shape itself is short. What takes the space is a single awkward fact that English has nothing like, and it is better met now than in the middle of the grammar volume. The plain verb is what grammarians call form I. There are ten forms altogether and the second period of this course is built on them, but they all take form I as their zero point: form II is form I with the middle consonant doubled, form IV is form I with a prefix, and so on. So the verb you meet here is not one shape among eleven. It is the shape the other ten are described as departures from, and the rest of the verbal system is unreadable until it is solid. The root family The shortest word the root can make Take the root of writing. Pour it into the plainest verb shape and you get a word of three consonants and two short vowels, and that word means he wrote. Notice what is not there. There is no separate word for he, because the shape itself says he; there is no auxiliary, because Arabic has none; and there is no infinitive, because Arabic does not have one. When an Arabic dictionary lists this root it lists exactly this word, the third person masculine singular of the past, and everything else in the entry hangs off it. English dictionaries list to write and translate the Arabic entry as to write, which is a convenience of the translation and not what the Arabic word says. That convention is worth pausing on, because it decides how you will look things up for the rest of your life. If you meet a verb in a text and want the dictionary, you do not look for the form in front of you. You strip it back to three consonants, put the plain past vowels on it, and look that up. The lesson at the end of this volume is entirely about doing that reliably; here you only need to know that the plain past is the address at which a verb lives. The one vowel that is not predictable Now the awkward fact. The first vowel of the plain verb is always a short a. The last is always a short a. The middle one is a, i or u, and which of the three a given verb takes cannot be worked out from anything. It is not predictable from the consonants, not from the meaning, not from the family the verb belongs to. It has to be learned with the word, in the way that an English speaker learns that the past of sing is sang and the past of bring is not brang. Three verbs of the same three-slot shape will show it. The verb for writing has a in the middle. The verb for drinking has i. The verb for growing big has u. All three are ordinary, common, everyday verbs; nothing about them suggests a division into groups; and the vowel in the middle is simply part of what the word is. There are two soft tendencies, and it is honest to call them tendencies rather than rules. Verbs with i in the middle lean towards states of the body and the senses: drinking, hearing, understanding, being glad, being ill. Verbs with u in the middle are almost all verbs of becoming or being some quality: growing big, growing small, being handsome, being far away. Verbs with a in the middle are everything else, which is most verbs. The tendency is real enough to be worth noticing and weak enough that you should never rely on it. Learn the vowel with the word. Is this a large burden? It is one bit of information per verb, and it decides the vowels of the present tense as well, which you will meet in 3.8. So the same fact does two jobs, and learning it once is enough. Compare the English speaker's position with irregular verbs, where sing, sang, sung has to be learned three times over. One short vowel is cheap. The table Three vowels, three patterns The model root, poured into the three plain verb shapes, gives the three names. The left column is the name of the shape and the next column is the same shape with a real root in it. Pattern A verb on it Root English What the group tends to hold فَعَلَ كَتَبَ ك-ت-ب he wrote most verbs of all kinds; the default group فَعِلَ شَرِبَ ش-ر-ب he drank the senses and the states of the body فَعُلَ كَبُرَ ك-ب-ر he grew big becoming or being a quality; a small closed group Say the three pattern names one after another and listen. The first and last beats are identical every time; only the middle moves. That is the whole of the difference, and it is the reason the three are counted as one shape with three vowellings rather than as three shapes. Ten verbs to hold the groups apart Ten plain verbs, sorted by their middle vowel. Every one of them appears in the sentences below or in a later lesson of this volume, and all ten are in the first thousand words of written Arabic. Verb Root Middle vowel English كَتَبَ ك-ت-ب a he wrote جَلَسَ ج-ل-س a he sat down دَخَلَ د-خ-ل a he entered أَكَلَ أ-ك-ل a he ate ذَهَبَ ذ-ه-ب a he went شَرِبَ ش-ر-ب i he drank سَمِعَ س-م-ع i he heard فَهِمَ ف-ه-م i he understood كَبُرَ ك-ب-ر u he grew big حَسُنَ ح-س-ن u it became good Read the first column of the five a-verbs straight down and you will hear one r