2.2 The Pattern (وزن) and فعل as a Model — Epoché
What you will be able to do Say what a pattern is, and why a root on its own cannot tell you what a word means. Use the model root to name a shape out loud, the way an Arab grammarian or an Arabic dictionary does. Name the three positions in a word by the letters of the model, and say which letters in a real word are root and which belong to the shape. Read four words from one new root and say which shape each of them is on. Recognise two written words that have the same consonants and different patterns, and say why only the vowel marks tell them apart. Prerequisites : 2.1 and the twelve words of the first root family The last lesson left you with a family and no way of talking about it. You could see that the word for a desk and the word for a library had a mim at the front that did not belong to the root, and that the word for a writer had a long a in the middle where the word for a book had a long a at the end, but there was no way to say any of that except by describing the vowels one at a time. This lesson gives you the vocabulary, and it is the vocabulary Arabs themselves use. The thing to be named is the shape: the arrangement of vowels, doublings and extra consonants that a root is poured into. Arab grammarians call it the weight of the word, because a shape is heard as a rhythm before it is anything else, and two words on the same shape have the same rhythm however different their consonants are. The English word pattern is the usual translation and it is what this course will use, but keep the image of weight at the back of your mind, because it explains why the system is audible and not merely orthographic. Naming shapes is a real problem and the Arab solution to it is one of the elegant inventions of the grammatical tradition. English has nothing comparable, so it is worth seeing how the problem could have been solved badly. You could number the shapes, which tells you nothing and has to be memorised. You could describe them, which gives you sentences like a noun with i in the first syllable and a long a in the second, accurate and unusable. What the tradition did instead was to choose one ordinary root and use the word it makes as a living template. The root family A second family, and a problem Here is a new root: the three consonants d, r and s, in that order, written د-ر-س and named dal ra sin. Its area of meaning is studying, and things to do with studying. Four very common words come out of it, and in ordinary unmarked Arabic two of them are written with exactly the same letters. The four are the word for a lesson, the word for a school, the word for a teacher and the word for the activity of studying. Take the middle two. The school is d, m in front of it, and a particular set of short vowels; the teacher is the same four letters, with a different set of short vowels and a doubled middle consonant. On a page without vowel marks they are the same word. Nothing but the sentence around them will tell you which is meant, and the sentences in the table below are exactly that case: one says that this is a school and the next says that I am a teacher, and in the corpus they are written identically. That is not a defect of Arabic writing and it is not rare. It is the ordinary condition of reading Arabic, and it is why this course prints the vowel marks for you until the end of the second period and then takes them away: by that point you will be reading patterns rather than letters, and the pattern will be supplied by your own knowledge of which shapes exist. Notice what has happened to the size of the problem, though. If the school and the teacher were unrelated words that happened to look alike, you would have to learn them as two accidents. They are not. They are one root on two shapes, and the shapes are the same two shapes that gave you a place and a doer in the first root family. Once you can name the shapes, an ambiguity in the letters becomes a choice between two known things, and a choice between two known things is a small problem. Naming the shape The model root is f, ayn and l, in that order: ف-ع-ل , named fa ayn lam. It was chosen because its area of meaning is doing, in the widest sense, so the basic verb built on it, فَعَلَ , means simply he did, and the noun فِعْل means an act, a deed. Being about doing in general, it belongs to no subject and gets in the way of nothing. Here is how it is used. To say that the word for a writer is on the same shape as the word for a student and the word for a worker, you do not describe the vowels. You pour the model root into the shape and say the result: فَاعِل . Anyone who knows Arabic hears that and knows the shape exactly, because it is one syllable with a long a, then a short i, then the final consonant. To name the shape of the word for a desk, you say مَفْعَل . To name the shape of the word for written, you say مَفْعُول . The shape has become a word you can pronounce, and that is the whole trick. Two consequences follow and both are practical. First, the names of the shapes are how dictionaries and grammars talk, so once you can read them you can use reference material written for Arabs. Second, the letters of the model give you names for the three positions in any word. The first root consonant is the fa of the word, the second is its ayn, the third is its lam. When a grammar tells you that a certain kind of verb has a weak lam, you now know it means that the third root consonant is a w or a y. That terminology will come back in every volume of this course. One warning. The model is a set of positions, not a set of sounds. When you say the name of a shape you are saying f, ayn and l with the vowels of that shape, and the f, the ayn and the l are placeholders. A beginner sometimes hears a shape name as a real word and tries to find it in the dictionary. It is in the dictionary, because the model root is an ordinary root with ordinary words of its own, but that is a coincidence of the choice of model and not what you ar