Lesson 83 – الدَّرْسُ الثَّالِثُ والثَّمانون

The style of astonishment - أُسْلُوبُ التَّعَجُّبِ

The first verbal pattern of astonishment – فِعْلُ التَّعَجُّبِ الأَوَّلُ(ما أَفْعَلَ)

• We are still in lesson eighty three of our free Arabic language course. This Arabic course with images and audios will help you learn Arabic.
• This pattern of Arabic astonishment consists of three words as follows (please read from right to left):

• Examples:

• In the above mentioned examples you may notice that the first pattern of astonishment consists of the following:

1-    Mā (ما):

• This is an indefinite vague noun which means thing (something). It is neither the questioning article as ما هَذَا ؟  (see lessons 41), nor the negation article as ما فَعَلَ مُحَمَّدٌ هَذا  (see lesson 31); rather it is a different article, and it indicates astonishment as مَا أَجْمَلَ السَّماءَ. In this structure of astonishment (mā) means something, as if we would say that something (unknown) made the sky beautiful, and I admire that thing.

2-    The verb (أَجْمَلَ):

• It is of the transitive pattern (أفْعَلَ), as أَخْرَجَ which means to make someone or something exit, and أَدْخَلَ which means to make someone or something enter. Therefore أَجْمَلَ here means to make something beautiful.
• In this astonishment pattern, the verb has to be conjugated always with the third person masculine singular (هو), and the doer of this verb is always a latent pronoun related to the preceding mā which is considered here subject of nominal sentence. The predicate of mā is the entire verbal sentence (the verb and its latent pronoun).

3-    The noun (السَّماءَ):

• This noun is the object of astonishment, i.e. the speaker expresses that he admires something that made the sky so beautiful.
• The object of astonishment is considered a direct object to the verb of astonishment, so it is always in the accusative case (i.e. signed originally with fatħah on its last letter).
• The object of astonishment has to be a definite noun.
• More examples: