The Arabic nominal system, intro

Arabic has a somewhat tricky system of case-inflections for its nouns. I’ve decided to note down some patterns I’ve seen in order to act as a دلالة الحائرين, a Guide for the Perplexed (in whose company I fall).

In general, Arabic nouns vary along four dimensions:

• number: singular (mufrad, مفرد), dual (muthannā, مثنى), plural (jam‘, جمع)
• gender: masculine (mudhakkar, مذكر) and feminine (mu’annath, مؤنث)
• state: definite, indefinite, and construct (iḍāfa,  إضافة)
• case: “nominative” (marfū‘, مرفوع), “accusative” (manṣūb, منصوب), and “genitive” (majrūr, مجرور)

The Latinate case terms are pretty horrendous when it comes to describing the possible meanings of the Arabic cases, and so I will use only the Arabic terms for them. For the rest, I shall use the English. All of the other terms should be fairly clear, except for the “construct state”, which is generally absent in Indo-European languages. (I’m not going to go into the semantics of the construct state here.)

A fifth dimension, animacy, is implicit and shows up in the formation of plurals. Briefly: when an animate object modified by an adjective takes the plural, then both noun and adjective must be in the plural. But when an inanimate object modified by an adjective takes the plural, then the adjective must be in the feminine singular—regardless of the gender of the object. Consider the four nouns: walad (p. awlād) “boy”, bint (p. bināt) “girl”, qalam (masc., p. aqlām) “pen”, sayyāra (fem., p. sayyārāt), “car”.  Modified by the (regular) participial adjective mukhtalif-  “writing”, we see (in the marfū‘ case):

• awlād mukhtalifūn(a)
• bināt mukhtalifāt(un)
• aqlām mukhtalifa(tun)
• sayyārāt mukhtalifa(tun)

A few random notes:

• Why “regular” adjectives? It’s because Arabic has two different kinds of plurals: the regular or “sound” (sālim, سالم) plural, which is formed regularly for (almost) all feminine nouns and adjectives and for many masculine nouns and adjectives (including all participial adjectives), and the “broken” (maksūr, مكسور) plural, which is formed for some masculine nouns and some masculine adjectives. The most common adjectives and nouns are often the ones that form the craziest broken plurals. Precisely how different broken plurals are formed doesn’t concern us here; all we care about are the ways in which they inflect.

• The regular feminine noun ends in a t, the so-called tā’ marbūṭa(t), but this is not pronounced in pausa. I’ve therefore written it in brackets (which has the added benefit of vaguely resembling the way it’s written in Arabic, as a ة). When case-endings are added, though, the tā’ marbūṭa(a) is pronounced, along with the endings.

• Incidentally, the Arabic word for inflections, i‘rāb (إعراب), is the verbal noun of the verb a‘raba (أعرب) formed from the root ‘-r-b (ع ر ب), which is also the source of the words “Arab” and “Arabic”. In fact, that particular form of the verb literally means “to make something Arab(ic)” or “to Arab-ize”. [I have no basis for this hypothesis, but if the claims made by Bohas, Guillaume, and Kouloughli in The Arabic Linguistic Tradition about the motivation behind Sībawayhi’s nomenclature are correct—i.e., that Sībawayhi picked as grammatical terms action nouns (maṣdar, مصدر) that describe the speaker’s intention—then it would seem that pronouncing the case-endings would stem from the speaker’s desire to make his speech as Arab as possible.]

Actual patterns to follow.