Lesson 59 – الدَّرْسُ التَّاسِعُ وَالْخَمْسُونَ

/kāna/ and its sisters - كـانَ وَأَخَوَاتُـهـا

/kāna/ and its sisters – كَـانَ وَأخَواتـها

• We are still in lesson fifty nine of our free Arabic language course. This Arabic course with images and audios will help you learn Arabic.
• We learnt earlier that there are two types of sentences in Arabic:
  1- The Arabic nominal sentence which consists originally of two part; the subject which is always noun, and the predicate which can be noun, sentence or quasi sentence (phrase).
  2- The Arabic verbal sentence which consists originally of a verb, and an agent of the verb.
• In this lesson we will study a new linguistic phenomenon related to the nominal sentence. It is some words that intervene in the nominal sentence and change its declension. These words are called /kāna/ and its sisters. They are originally verbs, and they relate the subject to the predicate in their same tense. Because they are verbs, they can be in the past, present, and imperative as the following examples:

• You have to pay a good attention that these annullers intervene only in the nominal sentence, so if you see any of them before a verb, do not think that it is a verbal sentence, instead it is a nominal sentence that has the subject as latent pronoun, as the following example:

• In the above mentioned example the sentence after /kāna/ is a nominal sentence. The subject is a latent pronoun, and the predicate is a verbal sentence (we mentioned this type of sentences in lesson (48) of the latent pronoun). The following table gives more explanation:

• Let’s see now /kāna/ and its mostly common used sisters, with some examples: