Lesson 58 – الدَّرْسُ الثَّامِنُ وَالْخَمْسُونَ

The nominal sentence  - الجُمْلَةُ الاِسْمِيَّةُ

The nominal sentence – الجُمْلَةُ الاِسْمِيَّةُ

• We are still in lesson fifty eight of our free Arabic language course. This Arabic course with images and audios will help you learn Arabic.
• The Arabic sentence is divided into two types, the nominal sentence and the verbal sentence.
• The Arabic nominal sentence is that which consists of subject (noun) and predicate (noun or sentence or quasi sentence )
• The Arabic verbal sentence is that which consists originally of a verb (فِعْل /fiξl/) and an agent of that verb (فاعِل /fāξil/), the agent has to come after the verb.
• The nominal sentence never begins with a verb, it can begin with a noun, an adverb, or a preposition, as the following examples:

• The nominal sentence cannot start with a verb as we notice from the example above.  However, it sometimes contains a verb in the middle, when the predicate is a verbal sentence. To clear this point we can compare the following two sentences:

• The first sentence shown above is a verbal sentence because it starts with a verb, while the second one is a nominal sentence which has the predicate verbal sentence.
• Let’s now see some examples of the nominal sentence:

• In the above mentioned examples, you may notice that all of the sentences consists of two parts; the subject and the predicate.
• The subject is called in Arabic (الْمُبْتَدَأ /al mubtada’/) this word is from the root (بَدَأَ /bada’a/) meaning to start. The literal meaning of the word (الْمُبْتَدَأ /al mubtada’/) is the thing with which we start. To clarify this point, it does not mean the word that we start speaking with, rather it means the word that we start thinking with.  As you saw above, we can start the nominal sentence without the subject, i.e. we can start it with a preposition or an adverb, and sometimes we start with the predicate.
• The second part of the nominal sentence is called in Arabic (الْخَبَر /al khabar/) this word means in the Arabic dictionary: the news or the information. We can therefore understand that this part means the information that we provide about the subject which we started the sentence with in our thought process.
• As we will see in this lesson, the predicate does not always come after the subject, there are some cases in which it is allowed to put the predicate first.
• Therefore, it is important to remember that we cannot recognize the two parts by their order in the sentence, but by the meaning.  If the word indicates something or someone who is central to the sentence and with whom we have started our thought process when creating the sentence, it is a subject.  If it indicates information about the subject, it is a predicate – irrespective of the order of the words in the sentence.
• In the following table there are some examples of the nominal sentence, illustrating its two parts; the subject and the predicate: