Lesson 90 – الدَّرْسُ التِّسْعُونَ
Introduction to Morphology - مُقَدِّمةٌ لِعِلْمِ الصَّرْفِ
How does Morphology study derivatives? –كيف يَدْرُسُ عِلْمُ الصَّرْفِ المُشْتَقَّاتِ؟
- Let's Continue to learn Arabic through our free Arabic language course. This Arabic course contains Arabic grammar, Arabic syntax, Arabic morphology and more.
- In the introduction of this lesson, we learnt that Arabic Morphology studies the forms of words regardless their positions in the structure.
- These forms will be studied in detail in the following lessons In-Shaa’-Allaah (God Willing).
- Each form of Arabic words belongs to a certain root (mostly consisting of three letters). We have to be capable to know the original letters of any word and differentiate them from the augmented letters.
- When we look up an Arabic word in the Arabic dictionaries, our search will not be based on the order of the letters; rather it will be based on the order of the letters of the root, i.e. after removing the augmented letters.
- For example, when we search for the word (key المِفْتَاح), we have to remove all augmented letters and look for the root (فَتَحَ).
- In the Arabic dictionary, we will find all the following derivatives under the root (فَتَحَ):
Picture | Word | Pattern | Example | ||
Arabic | English | Arabic | English | ||
| Open (verb) | I opened the book and then I closed it. | |||
| approach | The father approached his son the matter of marriage. | |||
|
Inaugurate | The painter inaugurated his new gallery. | |||
|
Bloom | Flowers bloom in spring. | |||
|
Hole | The ball fell into the hole. | |||
| Key | I’ll make a new flat for the apartment. | |||
| conqueror | This man is the conqueror of Andalusia. | |||
| Open (noun) | The door is open in front of me. | |||
| Open-minded | These are the open-minded young men in the village. |
- In the examples above, we notice that all the words belong to one root (ف ت ح – Fa Ta Ha). Some of the derivatives of that root are verbs as (فَتَحَ ، فاتَحَ ، اِفْتَتَحَ ، تَفَتَّحَ) and some other of the derivatives are nouns as (الْفُتْحَة، المِفْتَاح), while some other derivatives are adjectives as (الفاتِحُ، الْمَفْتُوح، الْمُتَفَتِّح).
- In this Morphology course, we will learn all the different derivatives, how to form them, and how to understand their meanings.
- For example, the doer noun is the noun which is derived from the verb to refer the doer of that verb. I could be formed from the 3 letters root verb as (كتب – He wrote) by adding an Alif after the first letter of the root and pronouncing a Kasrah after second (كاتِب - Writer) pronounced Kaatib. If the root consists of more than three letters e.g. (شَارَك – He participated), we derive the doer noun by adding an initial (م) followed by Dammah and following the penultimate by Kasrah, (مُشارِك – participant) pronounced Mushaarik.
- More examples:
Forming the doer noun | Pattern | Root | Doer | |
Arabic | English meaning | |||
From the three letters roots | فاعِل FāƐil | خَرَجَ He exited | The one who exits. | |
فاعِل FāƐil | دَخَلَ He enterer | The one who enters. | ||
From the four letters roots | مُفْعِل MufƐil | أَخْرَجَ He made somebody exit | The one who makes somebody exit. | |
مُفاعِل MufāƐil | شارَكَ He participated | Participant | ||
مُفَعِّلْ MuffaƐƐil | أَذَّنَ He called for prayer | The one who calls for prayer. |
- We will learn more patterns in of the doer noun in detail in lesson 98.