Categories
Uncategorized

RAIN!!!

It rained for about 45 min. today, with thunder and everything. I was told not to expect any rain until, you know… Febuary so this is kind of exciting. All the guys are hitching up their man dresses (called thobes I believe) to avoid getting them dirty. The men always wear white thobes, I’ve never seen one in any other color. Most of the women wear black hjabs although some of the older women wear multi colored ones. So the pavement is a little slick, but I hope that the dust will be cut down a bit for a while…

My brain is doing much better today. Sat down this morning and learned 7 new verbs (waked, went, did, left, watched, talked, and returned). In Arabic, the simplest form of the verb is the third person masculine in the past tense. They call this the root and everything else is conjugated from there. In English and French, we usually conjugate from the infinitive (to wake, to go, etc..). It’s been a constant battle to not think of the root as the infinitive, but I’m getting better…

Tonight it’s more verbs and then I will learn the 5 different ways to form a negative sentence (a sentence where there is a negation, i.e. I did not study). It gets weird because they make a big distinction in how you say “not” depending on the time frame indicated (indefinate vs definate time frames).

Want some more Arabic grammer? Of course you do! There are two basic sentence types, the verb sentence and the noun sentence. Verb sentences begin with a predicate (not necessairly the same thing as a verb) and are followed by the subject with a definate article (the). A noun sentence begins with a noun and is then followed by a predicate. One of the things that blew my mind was that you do not have to have a verb to make a complete sentence. So “Book on table” is an acceptable sentence in Arabic… Yes I am still trying to get used to it. It’s like an assumed verb. We have assumed subjects in English (Go outside! for example) but an assumed verb makes my head spin. I’m sure it’ll seem natural to me eventually….

Isaac

2 replies on “RAIN!!!”

In Arabic, are do and make the same verb as they are in many romance languages?
Your example of Go outside is a command which rarely has a subject.

The sentence “Go outside!” has an understood subject, you. Most imperatives don’t have an explicit subject but an implicit one. I haven’t gotten far enough to understand the subtlies of the meanings of words yet. I’ve used the “do” verb, I’ll ask if there is another for “make”. Arabic doesn’t seem to use the verb “is” in many contexts that we do, that’s why “Book on table” is OK, they know that it “is” on the table. Slow and steady progress….

Isaac

Leave a Reply to Anonymous Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.