3.5 Idafa: The Possessive Chain — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read two nouns standing side by side as a possessive chain, so that بَاب الْمَسْجِد means the door of the mosque. Apply the strict rule: the first noun of a chain never takes the article and never takes an indefinite ending. Say whether a whole chain is definite or indefinite, and show that the last noun decides it. Put an adjective on a chain in the right place, which is after the whole thing and not in the middle. Read a chain of three, as in نِهَايَة الْمَمَرّ extended. Prerequisites : 3.4 and the four agreements This construction has appeared in five lessons of this course without being named. The entrance of the museum in 2.5; the reading of books and the studying of history in 2.6; the door of the mosque and the key of the room below. Each time you were told to read two nouns in a row and wait for an explanation. Here it is. The construction is called the addition by Arab grammarians, because the second noun is added to the first, and it is the ordinary way Arabic expresses everything English does with of, with an apostrophe, and with one noun used to modify another. Of all the constructions in the grammar volume it is the commonest, and it is the one whose rule is most often broken by learners. The pattern Two nouns, nothing between them Put a noun immediately after another noun and the second possesses, defines or belongs to the first. The door — the mosque means the mosque's door. The key — the room means the room key. The king — the jungle means the king of the jungle. There is no word for of, no apostrophe, no preposition and no pause. The bare juxtaposition is the whole construction, exactly as the bare juxtaposition in 3.1 was a whole sentence. Arabic does a great deal with adjacency. The rule about the first noun The first noun of a chain is in a special state. It carries no article and no indefinite ending. It is bare, and its bareness is not a sign of indefiniteness; it is a sign that it is the first of a chain. This is the rule that has to be learned properly, because it runs against the reading habit of 3.3. There you were told that a noun without the article is indefinite. Here is the exception, and it is a large one: a noun without the article that is followed by another noun may be the first term of a chain, and in that case it is not indefinite at all. What follows is a practical reading procedure. When you meet a bare noun, look at the next word. If the next word is a noun, especially one with the article, you are probably in a chain and the bare noun is not indefinite. If the next word is an adjective, you are in the phrase or the sentence of 3.4. The last noun decides Is the whole chain definite or indefinite? The answer is given by the last noun and by nothing else. If the last noun has the article, or is a name, or has a possessive ending, the whole chain is definite: the door of the mosque, the key of the room, the end of the world. If the last noun is indefinite, the whole chain is indefinite: a door of a mosque, a room key. This matters because of the agreement rule you learned in 3.4. An adjective describing a chain has to match the chain's definiteness, and the chain's definiteness comes from its last word. So in the first sentence below, the whole chain is definite, and the adjective that follows it is indefinite, and the result is therefore a statement: the mosque's door is open. Where the adjective goes An adjective describing the first noun of a chain cannot be placed next to it, because nothing may come between the two nouns. It goes after the whole chain, and you work out which noun it belongs to by its agreement. That produces a genuine ambiguity when both nouns have the same gender and number, and Arabic simply lives with it. In the first sentence below the adjective is masculine, and so is the door, and so is the mosque; the sentence is unambiguous only because the adjective is indefinite while the mosque is definite, so it cannot be describing the mosque. That is a fine piece of reasoning to have to do, and you are not expected to do it at speed yet. What you should take away is the rule of position: the adjective is always at the end, never in the middle. Chains of more than two A chain can be extended: the door of the house of the teacher. Every noun except the last is in the bare state, and the last one decides the definiteness of the whole. Three is common in ordinary prose, four is possible, and five would be a stylistic fault in any language. How English says it English has three ways of doing this job, which is one reason it takes an English speaker time to see that Arabic has one. The first is of: the king of the jungle. The second is the possessive ending: the teacher's book. The third is simply putting one noun in front of another: the room key, the bus door, the car keys. All three come out as the same Arabic construction, and the order of the two nouns is the reverse of the English in two of the three cases. That reversal is the thing to drill. English says room key; Arabic says key room. English says bus door; Arabic says door bus. Whenever English glues two nouns together, turn them round. The of construction is the easy one, because the order matches: the king of the jungle, and in Arabic king jungle. If you are unsure which way round a chain goes, translate it with of and see whether it makes sense. One further English habit to suppress. English can say a friend of the teacher's, marking both ends. Arabic marks neither end and lets position do the work, so there is nothing to attach the English marking to. Real sentences Ten sentences, each with a chain in it. Find the two nouns, then say whether the chain as a whole is definite. As printed With the vowels supplied English باب المسجد مفتوح. [1] بَاب الْمَسْجِد مَفْتُوح. The mosque's door is open. انفتح باب الحافلة. [2] اِنْفَتَحَ بَاب الْحَافِلَة. The bus door opened. أحضر لي مفتاح الغرفة. [3] أَحْضِر لِي مِفْتَاح الْغُرْفَة. Bring me the room key. أعطن