3.9 The Past Tense (الماضي) — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read the six commonest past-tense endings and say who acted. See that كَتَبْتُ and كَتَبَتْ are written with the same letters and tell them apart from the sentence. Build the past of any form I verb from the dictionary entry, which is already the he form. Use the verb meaning was to put a two-part sentence of 3.1 into the past. Say why the past tense needs no pronoun, and what it means when one appears anyway. Prerequisites : 3.8 and the four prefixes After the present tense, the past is easy. There are no prefixes; the person is shown by an ending, exactly as in Latin or Spanish; and the dictionary form of the verb, which you have been learning since 2.3, is already one of the forms of the tense. Nothing has to be built from scratch. What is not easy is reading it on an unvowelled page, and that is where the real content of this lesson lies. Two of the commonest endings are written with the same letter and differ only in a vowel mark that is not printed. A reader has to get the person from the sentence, and doing that reliably is a skill worth practising now rather than in the fourth period. The pattern Six endings The stem is the plain past you learned in 2.3, with its unpredictable middle vowel, and the endings are added to it. The he form has no ending at all, which is why it is the dictionary entry. Who The root for writing The root for sitting English he كَتَبَ جَلَسَ he wrote, he sat she كَتَبَتْ جَلَسَتْ she wrote, she sat I كَتَبْتُ جَلَسْتُ I wrote, I sat you, to a man كَتَبْتَ جَلَسْتَ you wrote, you sat you, to a woman كَتَبْتِ جَلَسْتِ you wrote, you sat we كَتَبْنَا جَلَسْنَا we wrote, we sat There are four more forms, for they and for the plural you, and a set for the dual, which is 3.14. The six above will carry you through most of what you read, and they are the ones the sentences below use. The four that look the same Look at the second, third, fourth and fifth rows. All four end in the same letter, a t. On an unvowelled page they are one word, and the vowel that separates them is exactly the kind of mark that is never printed. So a reader meeting a past verb ending in t has four candidates: she, I, you to a man, you to a woman. In practice the choice is easy, because the sentence around it decides. If a subject is named after the verb, it is she. If the sentence is addressed to someone, it is you. If neither, it is usually I. The fifth and sixth sentences below are the clearest possible illustration: the same four letters, twice, with different pronoun endings on the following word, and the corpus translates one as she and the other as I. Nothing but the rest of the sentence makes the difference. That is the ordinary condition of reading Arabic, and it is not a defect: the information is present, it is simply distributed over the sentence rather than concentrated in the verb. The verb that was missing Lesson 3.1 said that Arabic has no present-tense verb meaning to be, and that a verb appears in the past. Here it is. It is a form I verb with a weak middle consonant, which disappears in some forms and returns in others, so its past looks shorter than you would expect. Put it in front of a two-part sentence and the sentence is in the past: the house was big, I was happy. The tenth sentence below does exactly this, and it also shows the thing said about the subject taking an ending you have not learned, which marks it as the object of the verb. That ending is part of the case system of 3.15 and you need only recognise it for now. Pronouns, again As in the present, the pronoun is not needed and is normally absent. Of the ten sentences below, none has a subject pronoun at all, and eight of them have no separate subject word of any kind. When a pronoun does appear with a past verb, it is emphatic: it corresponds to the English I wrote it, with stress, rather than to plain I wrote it. That is worth knowing because a learner who inserts pronouns everywhere will sound as though he is contradicting somebody. How English says it English forms its past by changing the verb itself, with an ending in the regular cases and with a vowel change in about two hundred common irregular ones. It does not mark the person at all: I wrote, you wrote, she wrote. Arabic does the reverse in both respects. The stem does not change for tense in any way a learner needs to notice, and the person is fully marked. So where English needs the pronoun and has no ending, Arabic has the ending and needs no pronoun. The one place English speakers reliably go wrong is in expecting the past to be harder than the present. It is not; it is the easier of the two, because there is no prefix and because the dictionary form is already in it. English also distinguishes I wrote from I have written and from I had written, and Arabic does not, or not with a separate tense. The plain past covers all three, and where the perfect sense has to be made explicit a particle is added in front, which is the one in the ninth sentence below. A learner should translate an Arabic past with whichever English tense the context wants and not look for an Arabic equivalent of the English three. Real sentences Ten sentences in the past. For each, say who acted, and say what in the sentence told you. As printed With the vowels supplied English كتب رسالة واحدة. [1] كَتَبَ رِسَالَة وَاحِدَة. He wrote one letter. كتبت رسالة واحدة. [2] كَتَبَتْ رِسَالَة وَاحِدَة. She wrote one letter. كتبت رسالة لأمي. [3] كَتَبْتُ رِسَالَة لِأُمِّي. I wrote a letter to my mother. أكل الجميع. [4] أَكَلَ الْجَمِيع. Everyone ate. أكلت الجبن. [5] أَكَلْتُ الْجُبْن. I ate the cheese. جلست بجانبي. [6] جَلَسَتْ بِجَانِبِي. She sat next to me. جلست بجانبها. [7] جَلَسْتُ بِجَانِبِهَا. I sat next to her. جلسنا جميعا. [8] جَلَسْنَا جَمِيعاً. We all sat. لقد كبرت! [9] لَقَدْ كَبُرْتَ! How you've grown! كنت فرحا بالأمس. [10] كُنْتُ فَرِحاً بِالْأَمْس. I was happy yesterday. The first three sentences are almost the same sentence three times, with