Arabic Essential Grammar #5 - The Article
Hello everybody! It has been a while since I did one of these - I’m going to try to do this on a weekly basis again. This time, I am going off of the book Modern Literary Arabic by David Cowan, but will add my own points and simplify where I can. Every Tuesday, I will aim to cover a topic that is essential to forming a strong basis in Arabic
I also need to work on my Arabic T.T so this is great for me too!
Today, we're talking about The Article - The Definite Article:
In English, we have "the" as the definite article and "a/an" as the indefinite articles. However, Arabic only has the definite article - ال. The indefinite is indicated by its absence.
Th article is prefixed to the word it defined, and the word loses its "n" ending ( Check Arabic Essential Grammar 1 to see why a noun might have different endings!).
e.g. اَلْكتَابُ كِتَابٌ
On the left, we have kitaabun and on the right we have al-kitaabu.
Here we can see the differnce between the indefinite ( left) and definite (right).
Pronunciation-wise, if a word comes before the "al", then it merges together with the previous consonant. e.g.
اَلْقَلَمُ و الكِتَابُ
is pronounced - al-Qalamu wal kitaabu.
The meaning is "the pen and the book".
The "al" is elided.
If there is a sun letter ( look these up and learn them!) following "al", then the "l" is skipped in favour of a shadda (doubled consonant) and the letter in front of it.
E.g.
اَلرّجُلُ
The Man - is pronounced arrajulu.
Hope that was helpful - try it out yourselves with a few different words - see if you can notice the pronunciation changes in a short video on Playaling!
See you next week!