SabaaH al-kheir!
Right now we're going to talk about a special set of verbs that we call, rather poetically,
'Kaana and its sisters,' or in Arabic كان وأخواتها.
All of these are verbs that mark the time or duration of actions, events or
states. Some of them you probably recognize, right? كان 'to be,' أصبح, 'to become,'
ما زال, 'to still be, or to still keep doing,' something. I've listed
them here. There are approximately twelve, depending on the source you consult. Some of them are quite rare, quite
archaic, even, and unless you go digging around very, very old
books, old poetry, you're Unlikely to encounter them in modern usage. But I've included them all just so
no one ever tells you that they don't exist.
They function essentially like other verbs, but in Arabic there are a couple of major differences.
One, we use a special set of terms to describe the grammar aound them in the sentence.
Two, their direct objects, if they have direct objects, take a special case ending.
And three, they can be used with مضارع مرفوع, a conjugated present tense verb, to convey
The timing of a state or an action with another helping verb. So let's take a look at some examples.
First, as you know, in a جملة اسمية,
a regular, nominative, non verbal sentence,
we use two words to talk about the subject and the predicate. If i said 'the boy is short,'
الولد قصير
الولد is my subjec,t my beginning, my مبتدأ,
and then قصير is the news, the payoff, the predicate or what we call in Arabic
الخبر.
Now suppose that I wanted to
say the same thing, only in the past. 'The boy was short.'
He grew up and got taller. But what we want to say is the boy was short. So I'm going to
use the verb for 'being' in the past. I'm going to say كان.
And now, instead of مبتدأ and
خبر, i use a slightly different, more specific set of terminology.
Since the whole sentence is now being affected by كان,
الولد
is now called
اسم كان,
sort of like 'the noun of kaana,' and then قصير, the end, the predicate, is specifically called خبر كان.
So, in terms of What we've done with sentence structure, not really much Has changed,
but in Arabic, we need to know to refer to it by
a second set of forms. The other thing that...
Excuse me, a second set of terminologies, right? But the form stays pretty much the same.
Here,
قصير
is almost like the object of كان. كان is a verb, and so direct objects for all verbs in
Arabic need to take a special case ending, that منصوب case ending. So since this is an indefinite noun,
I'm going to add
'fatha tanwiin.'
كان الولد قصيراً.
We probably aren't going to hear that ending in speech, but we might
see it if we were reading it in a book or a newspaper article in a more formal, less colloquial context.
If we
wanted to say instead 'the boy is not short, the terminology would remain pretty much the same, and
the rules would stay the same but instead of كان
we could negate this with ليس:
'the boy is not
short.'
And then Instead of saying اسم كان and خبر كان we would refer to these specifically as اسم ليس and خبر ليس.
But the process and the ideas remain
essentially the same.
Let's look at another example. If we wanted to say, since we're talking about
children and their relative heights, 'the girl got tall, the girl became tall.'
Maybe she was short, now she got tall.
I would take my verb for 'becoming' or
'turning into' something, and say
أصبحَتْ البنت طويلة.
Because بنت is feminine, we're talking about a girl here, and
then, because we need that منصوب
ending and طويلة Is indefinite, I would say طويلةً.
But I wouldn't have an 'alif,' because i have a 'taa marbuuTa'
to mark the feminine ending for 'the girl.' So in a case like this, البنت would be
اسم أصبح
'the subject, the noun of أصبح,'
our sentence, or excuse me, our verb that is sort of
the main action in the sentence, and then طويلة would be
خبر أصبح.
We probably wouldn't refer to it as 'اسم أصبحَتْ,' because we refer to the verbs in their masculine,
past tense form. That's just how it tends to be done.
To have said so as well, since these
nouns, 'the boy' and 'the girl,' البنت and الولد,
are the subjects in
formal Arabic, if we were vowelling, if we were doing all of the case endings, the إعراب,
الولد would be مرفوع with a 'Damma,' as
would البنت. We have separate videos on
what the case endings are in Arabic, and how we use them in individual sentences so,
if you haven't studied this yet, don't worry, it's coming down the road for you soon.
But if you're curious or if you need a refresher, you can go look at our videos on
إعراب, case endings in Arabic and the مرفوع endings, and the منصوب endings.
The other thing that كان وأخواتها can do for us is
talk about
actions happening.
Specifically not just
states of being, ('the boy is not short,' or 'the girl became tall,') but things that people
were doing, or are still doing. We can
sort of give a little more Information about the timeframe and the state of being while the action was happening.
So if i want to say
'my friend was studying in her room,'
I would say
كانت صديقتي تدرس في غرفتها.
Here I have كان, my verb and then صديقتي is going to be اسم كان, but
here, I don't have a noun or an adjective, a direct object, I have instead a whole
جملة فعلية, a verbal sentence, which is considered
خبر كان.
So, I don't need a noun there, and I don't
have to worry about the إعراب, these case endings, because I have a verb, and it's going to take its own case ending
in formal Arabic that
has its own rules. But this would mean 'my friend was studying,' kind of a past continuous sense.
'My friend was studying in her room.'
One final example: if I wanted to say
'my friend is still living in Amman,'
Then I would take this verb for 'still being,'
and I would say--let's make it a male friend this time--
ما زال صديقي يسكن في عمّان.
So here we have ما زال our verb, that's sort of situating things in time, 'the friend is still...'
صديقي would be اسم ما زال
and then here again, we have a جملة فعلية, a sentence that begins with a
verb. So this
ما زال is kind of situating this verb more specifically in time. 'My friend is still
living in Amman.' And then that جملة فعلية, that verbal sentence
would be
the خبر of
ما زال.