2.1 Three Consonants Carry the Meaning — Epoché
What you will be able to do Say what a root is in Arabic, and pick the three root consonants out of a written word. Read twelve words built on one root and say what each of them has to do with writing. Explain why an Arabic dictionary is arranged by root and not by the first letter of the word. Recognise that a root is an ordered set of consonants rather than a word, and that it is never said aloud on its own. Guess the area of meaning of a word you have never seen once you have found its root, and say what that guess cannot tell you. Prerequisites : 1.6 and the habit of reading a marked sentence at one pass Everything so far has been about getting Arabic off the page and into your mouth. From here on it is about how Arabic words are made, and this is the point where the language stops looking like a harder version of something you already know and starts working by a principle English does not have. Here is the principle in one sentence. An Arabic word is almost never built by gluing pieces onto the front and back of another word. It is built by taking three consonants, in a fixed order, and threading vowels and a few extra consonants through them according to a shape. The three consonants are the root. The shape is the pattern. This lesson is about the root; the next one is about the pattern. English does have something faintly like this, and it is worth naming so that you can set it aside. The pairs sing, sang, sung and drink, drank, drunk change an inner vowel rather than adding an ending, and the consonants stay where they are. That is a leftover in English: a few dozen irregular verbs behave that way and nothing else does. In Arabic it is not a leftover. It is the engine, and it builds nouns, adjectives, verbs, places, tools, abstractions and participles, all from the same three letters. The root family What a root is Take the three consonants k, t and b, in that order. Written as Arabic letters and separated so that you can see them as three separate things, they look like this: ك-ت-ب . Their names, in order, are kaf, ta and ba. That is the root, and Arab grammarians call it the جِذْر , which is also the ordinary word for the root of a plant. The image is exactly right: you cannot eat a root, and you cannot say one either. Three things about that string are worth being slow over. It is not a word. There is no way to pronounce ك-ت-ب , because three consonants in a row with no vowels between them is not sayable in Arabic any more than in English. When Arabs talk about a root they say the three letter names, one after the other, the way you would spell something out. The hyphens in this course are a printing convention to show that the three letters are being named rather than read. The order is fixed. The same three consonants in a different order are a different root with an unrelated meaning. This matters more than it sounds, because when you start hunting for roots inside long words you will be tempted to gather the consonants you find and shuffle them until they make something familiar. You cannot. The order on the page is the order of the root. It carries an area of meaning, not a meaning. The area for this root is writing, and things to do with writing. It does not mean to write, because to write is a particular word with a particular shape. Compare the way the English syllable scrib carries something about writing in scribe, script, scribble, describe, inscription, manuscript and prescription, without itself meaning anything you could put in a sentence. That comparison is the closest English gets, and it gets close enough to be useful. The difference is that scrib appears in a few hundred learned words borrowed from Latin, while the Arabic root system covers the whole language, including the commonest everyday words. Twelve words from three letters The table below gives twelve words from this one root. Read down the first column and you will see the same three consonants, in the same order, in every single one, with different vowels between them and, in some, an extra letter in front. Read down the last column and you will see that every meaning has something to do with writing, though the connections range from obvious to sideways. Some of them will surprise you. The word for a desk and the word for an office are the same word, and it is built on the pattern that means the place where something is done: the place of writing. Add a feminine ending to that and you get the library, or the bookshop, which in Arabic is the same word again and is disambiguated only by context. The word for a book is the one that English speakers usually meet first, and it is worth noticing that it is not the most basic member of the family. The verb is. Two of the twelve are there to show you a difficulty rather than to be learned now. The plural of the word for book is not made by adding anything: the consonants stay, the vowels change, and you get a word that looks nothing like a plural to an English eye. The same happens to the plural of desk. Plurals of that kind are called broken plurals, they are extremely common, and a later lesson in this volume is given to them. For now, notice only that the root survives the change and the vowels do not. Why the dictionary is arranged this way Open a traditional Arabic dictionary and you will not find the word for library under the letter mim, where its first letter would put it. You will find it under kaf, in the entry for this root, several lines down, among its relatives. The whole family lives in one place. That looks strange for about a day and then looks obviously right, because once you know the root you can read the entry and see the shape of the family instead of a list of unconnected words. It also means that looking a word up is a skill rather than an operation. To find a word in the dictionary you must first strip off what is not root: the article, the prefixes that a pattern adds, the endings that mark gender and number and person. What is l