3.1 The Nominal Sentence: No "To Be" — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read a two-word Arabic sentence such as الْبَيْت كَبِير and see that it is complete. Say why there is no word for is in it, and why putting one in would be wrong rather than merely unnecessary. Tell the two halves of such a sentence apart, and say which is the subject and which is the statement made about it. Use the definite article as the signal that tells you where the first half ends. Say what happens to the same sentence in the past, where a verb does appear. Prerequisites : 2.8 and the procedure for an unknown word The volume of roots is behind you and the grammar begins. It begins with the sentence type that an English speaker finds strangest for about a week and then finds easier than the English equivalent, because it has fewer parts. You have already read a dozen of these sentences without being told what they were. The door is open, the mosque is open, the pen is broken, I am a student, he is a worker: in every one of them the Arabic had two words and the English needed three. This lesson is about the word that is not there. The pattern Two words, and nothing joining them An Arabic sentence of this kind has two parts. The first names something. The second says something about it. Nothing stands between them: no verb, no copula, no particle, nothing. The two parts simply follow one another, and the fact that they have been placed side by side is itself the assertion. Arab grammarians call the first part the inchoative, the thing started from, and the second the report, the news given about it. Those names are worth knowing because they describe the relation exactly: here is a topic, and here is the news. English grammar has no matching pair of terms, which is part of why the construction feels foreign. It is important to understand that the missing verb is not being left out for brevity. There is no present-tense verb meaning to be in Arabic at all. A learner who supplies one is not being long-winded; he is producing something that does not exist. The sentence is complete as it stands, and adding anything would break it. Where does the first part end? If nothing separates the two halves, how does a reader know where the break falls? The answer is the definite article, and this is the first place in the course where it earns its keep. The first part is normally definite: it has the article on it, or it is a pronoun, or it is a proper name. The second part is normally indefinite: no article, nothing. So a reader running along a line sees a definite noun, then an indefinite word, and the break is between them. The house — big. The computer — new. The colours — beautiful. That is a rule of thumb rather than a law, and 3.3 will complicate it. But it holds for the great majority of sentences of this type, and it is the single most useful reading habit you can take from this lesson. When you meet two nouns in a row and the first has the article and the second has not, you are looking at a statement, not at a phrase. What agrees with what The second part agrees with the first in gender. If the thing spoken of is feminine, the word said about it carries the feminine ending. Compare the house is small with the car is small in the sentences below: the same adjective, once bare and once with the ending, because the car is feminine and the house is not. Gender is the subject of 3.2 and you are not expected to predict it yet. What you should see here is that the agreement is the only mark of the relation between the two halves. Arabic has removed the verb and put the connective work onto the ending of the adjective. And in the past? In the past tense a verb does appear, and it is an ordinary form I verb of the kind you met in 2.3. So the house was big has three words where the house is big had two, and the extra word is a verb meaning was. The same is true of the future. This tells you something about the language that is worth holding on to: the gap is specifically in the present tense, and it is a gap in the vocabulary, not in the grammar. Arabic has the verb; it simply does not use it of the present, because a bare juxtaposition already says now. How English says it English cannot do this at all. Every English clause needs a finite verb, and when there is nothing to say, English supplies is or are as a placeholder. Linguists call this a dummy, and English is one of the languages that insists on one. The effect on a learner is that the English translation always has one word more than the Arabic, and the extra word has no Arabic counterpart to point at. When you write out a translation, resist the temptation to hunt for the missing piece. There is nothing missing. English does have fragments of the Arabic behaviour in fixed phrases: the more the merrier, once bitten twice shy, no smoke without fire. These are felt as proverbs or as headlines precisely because they lack a verb. In Arabic that pattern is not a special effect; it is the ordinary way of making a statement about something. The other place an English speaker has met this is in Latin or Russian, where the present of to be is also commonly dropped. If you have had either language, the construction will cost you nothing at all. One practical warning about translation into English. Because the Arabic has no verb, it has no tense either, and the tense of your English is supplied by the context and not by the sentence. In a story about last year, a sentence of this kind may well be translated with was. Real sentences Ten sentences, none of which contains a verb, all of which are complete. Read the left column and mark where the break between the two halves falls before you look right. As printed With the vowels supplied English البيت كبير. [1] الْبَيْت كَبِير. The house is big. البيت صغير. [2] الْبَيْت صَغِير. The house is small. الحاسوب جديد. [3] الْحَاسُوب جَدِيد. The computer is new. السيارة صغيرة. [4] السََّيَّارَة صَغِيرَة. The car is small. الألوان جميلة [5] الْأَلْوَان جَمِيلَة. The colors are pretty