2.6 The Verbal Noun (مصدر) — Epoché
What you will be able to do Recognise the noun that names the action itself, which Arab grammarians call the source, and read كِتَابَة as the writing rather than a writer or a written thing. Say why this noun cannot be built from a rule, and what an Arabic dictionary does about that. Read the four commonest shapes it takes, among them قِرَاءَة , سَفَر and دُخُول . Use the construction in which this noun takes another noun straight after it, as in دِرَاسَة التََّارِيخ . Say where the English -ing form matches it and where the comparison breaks down. Prerequisites : 2.5 and the place shape A root has now given you a verb, a doer, a thing done to and a place. One thing is still missing, and it is the one the whole family is about: the action, named as a thing. Not he studied, and not a student, and not a school, but the studying. Arabic has a noun for this and treats it as the most basic noun a root can produce; the Arab grammarians call it the source, on the theory that the verb comes out of it rather than the other way round. Western grammars usually call it the verbal noun, and this course will use that name because it says what the thing does. English has two ways of doing the same job and uses both constantly: the -ing form, as in reading is good for you, and the Latin-derived endings, as in the destruction of the city. An English speaker therefore has no trouble with the idea. The trouble is entirely in the shapes, because Arabic has about thirty of them for form I alone and no reliable way of predicting which one a given verb takes. The root family The noun the whole family is about Take the root of writing one last time. Its verbal noun is a word of the shape with a short i, a long a and the feminine ending, and it means the act of writing, and by extension handwriting. It is the seventh member of that family you have met, and with it the family is complete for form I: the verb, the doer, the thing written, the place, the library, the plural of the book, and now the writing. The root of reading gives a noun on the same shape, and it means reading. The root of studying gives a noun on the same shape, and it means study. Three roots, one shape, three related meanings, and if the story ended here the lesson would be over in a paragraph. It does not end here. The root of travelling gives a verbal noun of two short syllables. The root of entering gives one with a long u. The root of speaking gives one with a long a and no feminine ending. The root of understanding gives one with no long vowel at all. All four are perfectly ordinary and all four are on different shapes, and nothing in the consonants or the meaning would have told you which. The shape cannot be predicted, and what follows from that This is the second unpredictable thing in this volume, after the middle vowel of the plain verb in 2.3, and it is much bigger. A verb has one middle vowel out of three; a verbal noun has one shape out of roughly thirty. It is fair to call it the largest single piece of memorisation in elementary Arabic. Three things make it bearable, and they are worth stating plainly because the alternative is to be frightened of a volume of Arabic vocabulary that is genuinely not frightening. The first is that the shapes are not evenly distributed. Four of them cover a large majority of the common verbs, and they are the four in the table below. If you can read those four, you will recognise the verbal noun of most verbs you meet even when you have not learned that particular word. The second is that, unlike the middle vowel, the shape is fully visible in unvowelled writing when there is a long vowel in it. Three of the four commonest shapes have one. So this is a burden on production, not on reading, and reading is what this course is for. The third is that the derived forms, the ones numbered II to X, each have exactly one verbal noun shape, with no choice at all. Form I is the exception, not the rule. When you reach the second period you will find that the whole rest of the verbal system is regular in this respect, and the thirty shapes you are being warned about here belong to the first form only. What it is used for Two uses will carry you a long way, and both are in the sentences below. The first is the plain one: the noun stands as the object of a verb like to like or to learn, exactly where English would put an -ing form. I like reading, she can speak, he loves travelling. In all three the Arabic has a definite noun where English has a bare -ing, and the definite article is normal in this use. A learner who leaves it out sounds odd. The second is the one that does not look like English at all. The verbal noun can be followed immediately by another noun, and the second noun is what the action is done to: the studying of history, the reading of books. There is no word for of. The two nouns simply stand next to each other, exactly as the entrance and the museum did at the end of 2.5. This is the possessive chain again, and lesson 3.5 will take it apart properly; here you need only see that a verbal noun is one of the commonest things to find at the head of one. The table The four shapes that carry most of the language The left column is the shape with the model root in it. Each of these covers dozens of common verbs. Shape A verbal noun on it Root The verb English فِعَالَة كِتَابَة ك-ت-ب كَتَبَ writing فِعَالَة قِرَاءَة ق-ر-ء قَرَأَ reading فُعُول دُخُول د-خ-ل دَخَلَ entering, entry فُعُول جُلُوس ج-ل-س جَلَسَ sitting فَعَال كَلَام ك-ل-م كَلَّمَ speech, talking فَعَال ذَهَاب ذ-ه-ب ذَهَبَ going, departure فَعَل عَمَل ع-م-ل عَمِلَ work, doing فَعَل سَفَر س-ف-ر سَافَرَ travel, journey Read the second column down the page and listen for the four rhythms, two rows at a time. The first pair has a long a in the second syllable and a feminine ending; the second pair has a long u; the third pair has a long a and no ending; the fourth pair is short and has no long vowel at all. The last two rows are worth a second l