How to Say “No Longer” in Arabic

جُمْلَة

root: ج-م-ل / noun / plural: جُمَل / definition: sentence, (grammatical) clause

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With some constructions, you won’t realise how often you’ll need to use them until after you learn them—and then you wonder why you hadn’t learnt them earlier! For me, this was one of them: creating sentences using “no longer” in Arabic.

Simply, “no longer” translates into Arabic as لَمْ يَعُد:

لَم is the past tense negation,

and يَعُود has many meanings dependent on the context, including its most common usage, “to return”.

Verbs following لَمْ are in the jussive case (a.k.a. مجزوم), meaning that the last vowel on the verb changes to a sukoon:

يَعُودُ —> يَعُودْ

But يَعُودْ can’t remain in that form as Arabic doesn’t generally allow there to be a long vowel before a letter carrying a sukoon, as it’s more difficult to pronounce. So the long vowel sound (و) is dropped:

يَعُودْ —> يَعُدْ

And that’s how we end up with لَمْ يَعُدْ.

(Note: this changes according to the subject e.g. لَم أَعُد “I no longer”, لَم تَعُد “she/it (f) no longer”, لَم يَعُودُوا “they no longer”, etc.)

Now, what are the rules for making sentences or phrases with this construction?

The good news is… there’s not many!

لَم يَعُد can be followed by a range of different word types and phrases, look at these examples:

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لَمْ تَعُد المَدينةُ مَقْصِداً سِياحيّاً كما كانت في الماضي

the city was no longer a tourist destination as it was in the past

(Note that مقصداً سياحياً (“tourist destination”) is in the object case (منصوب) here, as it is the object of لم تعد! The subject is المدينة, “the city”.)

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لَم أعُد قادِراً على تحمُّلِ المَسؤوليّة

or

لَم أعُد أستطيعُ تحمُّلَ المَسؤوليّة

I can no longer handle the responsibility

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لَم يَعُد إلَيهِ سَبيل

there is no longer any possibility for it

(This example is from the Hans Wehr dictionary which you should definitely check out if you want to see more examples!)

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لم يَعُد مِنَ المُمكِن تجاهُلُ تراكُم المَشاكل

it is not longer possible to ignore the accumulation of problems

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لم يَعُد لَدَينا خِيار

we no longer have a choice

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لم تَعُد هناك حاجةٌ ماسّةٌ إلى هذِهِ الأَشْياء

there is no longer an urgent need for these things / these things are no longer urgently needed

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I hope this was clear and will be useful for you! Feel free to ask any questions in the comment section below!

!مع السلامة

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