2.8 Reading a Word You've Never Seen — Epoché
What you will be able to do Work through an unknown word in four steps: peel off what belongs to the shape, read the root, name the shape, and check the guess against the sentence. Read مِفْتَاح without being taught it, from a root you already own. Recognise two shapes this volume has not taught, the instrument and the trade, and say what each does. Say what the procedure cannot do, and when to stop and reach for a dictionary. Look a word up correctly in a root-ordered Arabic dictionary. Prerequisites : 2.7 and the broken plural patterns This is the lesson the volume has been for. Everything in it so far has been a description of the system; this one is a procedure, and it is the single technique that separates a reader of Arabic from someone who can only recognise words already learned. An English speaker reading French can guess at an unknown word because half the vocabulary is shared. An English speaker reading Arabic shares nothing, and would be helpless, except that Arabic words are transparent in a way French words are not: a word you have never seen is usually a root you have seen in a shape you have seen, and the two together will get you close enough to read on. Close enough to read on is the standard to aim for, and it is worth being clear about that from the start. The procedure below will not always give you a dictionary definition. It will very often give you the field of meaning and the grammatical category, and in a sentence that is normally all you need. Reading is not decipherment; it is going forward with enough understanding to keep going. The root family The four steps The procedure is short. It is worth learning as four numbered steps and then doing it until it stops being four steps and becomes one look. One: take off what belongs to the shape. A mim at the front, a long vowel in the middle, a doubled consonant, a feminine ending, a hamza and a long a at the start of a plural: all of these are shape, not root. What is left should be three consonants, sometimes four. Two: read the three consonants as a root. If you know it, you have the field of meaning. If you do not, hold it and go on, because step three may still tell you something useful. Three: name the shape. Use the model root, as in 2.2. Is it the doer, the done-to, the place, the instrument, the verbal noun, a plural? Each one carries a meaning of its own, independent of the root. Four: put the two together and test the result against the sentence. Does the word have the definite article? Is it after a preposition? Is there an adjective agreeing with it? Those things tell you whether it is a noun, and whether it is singular or plural, and they will often rule out one of two candidate readings. The procedure on a real word Take the word for a key, which this course has not taught you. Work it as the four steps. The word begins with a mim, so the mim is probably shape. There is a long a before the last consonant. Taking both off leaves three consonants, and those three are the root you met in 2.4 as the verb meaning to open and the adjective meaning open. So the field of meaning is opening. Now the shape. It is not the place shape, which has a short a after the mim and no long vowel. It is not the done-to, which has a long u. It has a short i after the mim and a long a before the last consonant, and that is the instrument shape: the thing with which the action is done. A thing with which one opens is a key, and you have arrived at the right answer with nothing but the root of an adjective you already knew. Do the same with the word for a lamp in the eighth sentence below. A mim, a short i, a long a before the last consonant: the instrument shape again. The root is the one behind the word for morning, which is to say light. A thing with which one makes light. A lamp. Two shapes this volume has not given you The instrument shape is the first of them and you have just used it. It is a mim with a short i, and it is one of the most productive shapes in the modern language, because every machine invented since 1850 has been named with it. The second is the trade shape, which doubles the middle consonant and puts a long a after it. It names someone who does something habitually or for a living, and it sits beside the doer shape of 2.4 with a clear difference of sense: the doer is whoever is doing the thing now, while the trade is what a man is. The word in the fifth sentence below is on this shape, from a root meaning to draw, and it means a painter by profession. Both shapes are being given here rather than in lessons of their own for a reason. You should meet, at least once, the experience of reading a word on a shape you have not been taught, and finding that the shape itself is legible. That is the condition you will be in for the rest of your life with Arabic, and the volume would be dishonest if it left you thinking the list of shapes was closed. Where the procedure fails Three honest limits. The first is that meanings drift. A word on the place shape from the root of writing ought to mean a place of writing, and it does; but the same root's done-to shape, which ought to mean a written thing, is also the ordinary word for fate, because what is written is what has been decreed. No procedure gets you from a root to that. When the analysis gives you something that does not fit the sentence, believe the sentence. The second is that many roots have two unrelated fields of meaning, because two originally different roots have fallen together. The dictionary will list them as separate entries with numbers, and you choose by context. The third is that borrowed words have no root at all. Champagne in the sixth sentence is not analysable, and neither is the name in the ninth. If the letters will not resolve into a familiar shape, consider that the word may be foreign, and look at whether it is a proper name. Looking it up Arabic dictionaries are ordered by root, not by the alphabetical order of the word as written. The wo