3.11 Negation — Epoché
What you will be able to do Choose the right negative for the tense, so that لَا negates a present and لَمْ a past. Read لَمْ يَشْرَب and see that a present-tense verb has been used to say he did not drink. Negate a sentence that has no verb in it, using the defective verb لَيْسَ . Form a prohibition, and say why it looks like an ordinary negative statement. Say why لَا أَحَد means nobody although neither word does on its own. Prerequisites : 3.10 and the question words English negates everything with one word. Not, or its contracted form, is placed after the auxiliary, and where there is no auxiliary the verb do is supplied for it to attach to. One word, one procedure. Arabic has five, and chooses among them by tense and by sentence type. That sounds like a burden and is in fact a convenience: each of the five is a single short word, none of them changes the verb it negates except in one small respect, and having chosen the right one you are finished. The pattern The five Negative What it negates The verb after it English لَا the present present tense does not, is not doing لَمْ the past present tense, with a changed ending did not مَا the past, and nominal sentences past tense, unchanged did not لَنْ the future present tense, with a changed ending will not لَيْسَ a sentence with no verb nothing; it is itself the verb is not, are not Two of the five are worth a paragraph each, and the rest are as simple as they look. The past negated with a present verb The second row is the one that startles everybody. To say he did not drink, Arabic uses a particle meaning did not and follows it with the present tense of the verb. The past tense does not appear at all. The particle carries the pastness; the verb supplies the meaning and the person. It is not as strange as it looks: English does something comparable when it says he did not drink, where the past is on the auxiliary and drink is bare. The verb after it takes a slightly different ending, which is called the jussive and belongs to 3.16 in the second period. In the forms you have learned it amounts to a sukun on the last consonant, which is not printed, so for reading purposes there is nothing to see. The third row is the alternative, and it is simpler: the particle meaning not with an ordinary past verb. It is commoner in speech and in older writing, and either can be used. If the choice troubles you, use the second row for writing and recognise the third when you read it. Negating a sentence with no verb The sentences of 3.1 have no verb, so there is nothing for a particle to attach to. Arabic supplies a verb for the purpose, and it is one of the strangest words in the language: it has only past-tense forms, it means the present, and its whole function is to negate. It takes the endings of 3.9, so it changes for person exactly like an ordinary past verb, and the eighth, ninth and tenth sentences below give three of its forms. What follows it takes the accusative ending you met in 3.9 and 3.10, which is visible on a masculine noun even without vowel marks. So the pair to learn is this: a sentence of the form the house is big, and its negative, the house is not big, formed by putting this verb at the front and changing the ending of the last word. Prohibition To tell somebody not to do something, use the first negative with a present-tense verb addressed to that person. The result looks exactly like a statement meaning you do not do it, and only the context and the intonation separate them. The verb takes the same jussive ending as after the particle for the past, and again it is not visible. The third sentence below is a prohibition and the first is a statement, and on the page their structure is identical. Nobody, nothing, never Arabic has no single words for these. It uses the first negative followed by a noun: no one, no thing. The eleventh sentence below says literally no one owns the moon, and the two words together do the work of English nobody. Note that this is not a double negative. Arabic is not saying nobody doesn't own it; the negative attaches to the noun and the verb after it is positive. English speakers who have been taught to avoid double negatives sometimes over-correct here, and there is nothing to correct. How English says it English has one negative word and a great deal of machinery around it. The machinery is what an Arabic speaker finds difficult and what an English speaker has to dismantle. The first piece to dismantle is the auxiliary. There is no Arabic do, so I do not know is two words: not, know. The second is contraction, which has no Arabic counterpart at all. The third is the position: English puts not after the first verb, Arabic puts its negative in front of everything. What English speakers find genuinely new is choosing by tense. There is no way to avoid it and no shortcut: you must know whether you are negating a past, a present, a future or a verbless sentence before you can pick the word. The advantage is that having picked it, you are done. English also negates nouns and adjectives with prefixes, as in unhappy and impossible. Arabic does that with a different mechanism, a word meaning other than placed in front, which is beyond this lesson but worth knowing exists so that you do not look for a prefix. The last difference is in the answer to a negative question. English says yes when it means the positive, and Arabic uses a special word of its own for contradicting a negative, as French does with si and German with doch. English has lost that word and has to say yes it is or no it isn't. Real sentences Eleven negatives. Name the particle and the tense before you read the English. As printed With the vowels supplied English لا أعرف. [1] لَا أَعْرِف. I don't know. لا أدخن. [2] لَا أُدَخِّن. I don't smoke. لا تتدخل! [3] لَا تَتَدَخَّلْ! Do not interfere! لم أفهم. [4] لَمْ أَفْهَم. I did not understand. لم يشرب. [5] لَمْ يَشْرَب. He didn't drink. لن أخسر! [6] لَنْ أَخْسَر! I won't lose! لن أعود. [7] لَنْ