Lesson 91 – الدَّرْسُ الحَادِي وَالتِّسْعُونَ
The Morphologic Measurement - الْمِيزانُ الصَّرْفِيُّ
The patterns of the four letters root verb –أَوْزَانُ الْفِعْلِ الرُّبَاعِيِّ
- Let's Continue to learn Arabic through our free Arabic language course. This Arabic course contains Arabic grammar, Arabic syntax, Arabic morphology and more.
- The four letters root verb is the verb whose original letters are four regardless any augmentations. Actually, there are two types of the four letters root verb, as follows:
- The four letters abstract verb: It comes without any augmented letters to its root, e.g. بَـعْـثَـرَ (meaning He rummaged): all the four letters in this verb are original. Therefore, we look it up in the dictionary by the order of the four letters. The pattern of that verb is formed by adding an additional Laam to the word (FaƐala فَعَلَ) to be (FaƐlala فَعْلَلَ). Please, consider the following examples:
Pattern (FaƐlala فَعْلَلَ) of the abstracted four letters root verb | |||
Verb | Meaning of verb | Example | Meaning of example |
Shake | The death of the president shocked (shook) me strongly | ||
Seduce | The woman seduced her husband (e.g. to do illegal action) | ||
Rummage | The child rummaged his fathers’ papers. | ||
Decorate | The ancient Muslims decorated their houses. | ||
Revel | The kid reveled after getting out of home. | ||
come to light | “Now that the truth has come to light” she said. |
- It’s worth mentioning here that this pattern is possibly related also to nouns, as the following examples:
Noun | Meaning | Example | Meaning of example |
A name of a man | Gaafar came back to his homeland. | ||
Scorpion | Take care from the yellow scorpion | ||
Bud | That bud is not convenient for cultivation. | ||
Trench | We have to dig a trench around the tent. |
- N.B.: These nouns also can be transformed to verbs with the meaning of the action related to the same each noun, e.g.: we can say “خَنْدَقَ الرَّجُلُ” meaning that the man has made a trench.
- Now, let’s go to study the augmented forms of the four letters root verb. We will show you just two forms in the following table:
Verb | Meaning | Pattern | Sentence | Meaning |
Roll over | The ball has rolled over. | |||
Scatter | The beads of the necklace scattered. | |||
Appear – come to light | The right has come to light. | |||
Being shaken | The ground has been shaken underneath him. | |||
Being specialized | The companies are specialized. | |||
Shudder | The bodies shuddered. | |||
Rest assured | My heart has rested assured. | |||
Disgust | My father disgusted this matter. |
- As you may notice, the augmented four letters root verb comes in two forms:
- The first one augmented with one letter in the pattern of “تَـفَـعْـلَـلَ”. The verb in this pattern means that the object makes the verb itself, although it seems to be done by other like passive voice. For example, when we say “تَدَحْرَجَتِ الْكُرَةُ the ball rolled over” we ignore the real doer which appears in the sentence “دَحْرَجَ مُحَمَّدٌ الكُرَةَ”. The verb تَدَحْرَجَ is active voice in form, but passive voice in meaning.
- The second form is augmented with two letters. It is on the pattern of “اِفْعَلَـلَّ” with an initial Alif and an additional Laam represented with the Shaddah on the final Laam.