2.7 Broken Plurals — Epoché
What you will be able to do Say what a broken plural is, and why كُتُب is the plural of كِتَاب although nothing has been added to it. Read the five commonest broken plural patterns and recognise them in a word you have not met. Say why the plural has to be learned with the singular, and what a dictionary entry looks like because of that. Read مَدَارِس and know that every place noun of 2.5 makes its plural the same way. Explain why a broken plural is often invisible on an unmarked page, and what a reader does about it. Prerequisites : 2.6 and the verbal noun Every noun in this volume has been singular, and that was deliberate. The Arabic plural is the point at which the root-and-pattern system stops being a convenience and starts making demands, and it is better met after five lessons of patterns than before them. English makes a plural by adding something to the end: books, houses, men being the famous exception and oxen the famous relic. Arabic can do this too, with an ending, and for a certain kind of noun it does. But the ordinary plural of the ordinary noun is not made that way at all. It is made by taking the consonants of the singular out of their shape and pouring them into a different one. Nothing is added at the end; often nothing is added anywhere; the word simply changes shape inside. Arab grammarians call it the broken plural, because the singular has been broken up and rebuilt, and the name is exact. The root family A plural with nothing added Start with the word you know best. The word for a book has a short i, a long a and three consonants. Its plural has the same three consonants, a short u, another short u, and no long vowel at all. It is shorter than the singular. Nothing has been added; two vowels have been changed and one has been removed. Now look at what that means on a page without vowel marks. The singular and the plural are written with the same three letters plus the long a of the singular, which is written with a letter; so in this particular pair the skeletons do differ. But there are pairs where they do not differ at all, and in those the plural is simply invisible until you read the sentence. This is the same condition you met in 2.2 with the school and the woman teacher, and the answer is the same: the grammar of the sentence decides, and a reader who knows the patterns has only two candidates to choose between. A plural with a hamza in front The second common pattern adds a hamza and a long a: the word for a boy gives a plural that means boys or, more usually, children. The word for a pen gives its plural the same way, and so does the word for a door. Three unrelated roots, one pattern. That is the most useful fact in this lesson. The patterns are not tied to meanings. Any root can take any of them, and knowing that a plural is on this pattern tells you nothing about what it means; it tells you only that it is a plural. What you get from the pattern is a reading, not a meaning, and that is exactly what you need, because the meaning is already in the consonants. Why it has to be learned There is no reliable way to derive the plural from the singular. There are tendencies, and some are quite strong: nouns of four letters with a long vowel in the middle usually take one particular pattern, and place nouns beginning with a mim take another with near certainty. But for the ordinary three-consonant noun, the plural is a fact about the word. So an Arabic dictionary gives it. Every noun entry in every dictionary lists the plural immediately after the singular, and the vocabulary tables of this course do the same, which is why the new words of every lesson have a plural column. Learn the two together from the beginning and you will never have the problem; learn the singular alone and you will have to go back for every word. It is worth saying how large this burden actually is, because it is smaller than it feels. There are about twenty-five patterns in use, five of which cover most of the common nouns. A learner who reads several hundred pages will meet the frequent plurals many times and absorb them, and will guess correctly at unfamiliar ones more often than not. What you should not do is try to learn the twenty-five patterns as a list. Learn the words. The other kind of plural Arabic does have plurals made with an ending, and they are called sound plurals because the singular survives intact. They are used for two groups: male human beings described by a participle or an adjective, and a large class of feminine nouns, especially those ending in the feminine ending. The plural of the word for a school is broken, but the plural of the word for a study is sound. The sound plurals belong to lesson 3.14 and the grammar volume, because their endings interact with the case system. They are mentioned here only so that you are not surprised when a plural turns up with something added to the end after this lesson has told you that plurals do not work that way. Many do not. Some do. The table Five patterns and the words on them The left column is the pattern named with the model root, as in 2.2. The singular and the plural are of the same root, and you have met most of these singulars already. Plural pattern Singular Plural Root English فُعُل كِتَاب كُتُب ك-ت-ب book, books أَفْعَال وَلَد أَوْلَاد و-ل-د boy, children أَفْعَال قَلَم أَقْلَام ق-ل-م pen, pens أَفْعَال بَاب أَبْوَاب ب-و-ب door, doors فِعَال رَجُل رِجَال ر-ج-ل man, men فُعُول بَيْت بُيُوت ب-ي-ت house, houses فُعُول دَرْس دُرُوس د-ر-س lesson, lessons فُعَّال طَالِب طُلَّاب ط-ل-ب student, students فُعَّال عَامِل عُمَّال ع-م-ل worker, workers مَفَاعِل مَدْرَسَة مَدَارِس د-ر-س school, schools مَفَاعِل مَطْعَم مَطَاعِم ط-ع-م restaurant, restaurants The last two rows are the free gift of this lesson. Every place noun you learned in 2.5 makes its plural on that one pattern, and it does so with no exceptions worth mentioning. So the eleven buildings of the last lesson have just become twenty-two words, and you did not h