Using إيّا and an Object Pronoun

مُقابَلة

root: ق-ب-ل / noun / plural: مُقابَلات / definition: interview

I woke up very early on Monday morning to a sprawling breakout across my forehead and scratches across my chest that weren’t there the night before—two signs telling me I was stressed. Not that I didn’t know it, because I had a 7:30am interview (in Arabic, which adds to it) that I wasn’t prepared for.

But it went well, I think. The breakout and scratches are still healing though.

It’s usually around this time of year that I start planning out my summer, so I also applied for a summer school yesterday before acting as my mum’s cheerleader/person-holding-the-phone-while-she-watched-the-YouTube-workout-video for the first half of her Pilates session. After visiting family in the evening then coming home and making meatballs, I was too tired to write a post.

Sorry for the diary entry. What I was getting round to was the fact that I’m glad I didn’t write anything last night, in my sleepiness, because this morning I was greeted by a certain memory…

During my master’s course, when we were translating a passage of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen from English to Arabic, I encountered the following sentence:

She poured water from the pitcher into two small tin cups and handed them to us.

Okay, it doesn’t look particularly remarkable. But let’s focus on that last part, “handed them to us”.

So my immediate breakdown, with a little reordering and rewording, was:

she handed = she gave: أَعطَت

us (indirect object): ـنا

them (i.e. the two cups, the direct object): ـهُما

Which would give us أعطتناهما. Hmm.

The verb أعطت here has two objects, which is why this clause looks a little messy as one word.

Here’s where the particle إيّا comes in.

إيّا can carry an object pronoun, unburdening that poor verb from one of them.

So instead of أعطتناهما, we can say أعطتنا إيّاهما which literally translates as “she gave us them”, with the إيّا carrying the direct object.

There’s other contexts in which we can use إيّا to carry an object pronoun, though—we don’t necessarily have to hold out for a verb with two objects in order to use this particle.

Here are some other examples:

مُتَّهِماً إيّاهُ بالتَّوَرُّط…

…accusing him of involvement

Above, we have a circumstantial (حال) clause which uses an active participle in the accusative case (منصوب). The active participle (متّهماً) has a verbal meaning here, and ـهُ/him is its object. With إيّا carrying the object, the clarity of the phrase is maintained: if we had said متّهمه instead of using إيّا, (a) its role as a circumstantial participle would be masked and (b) it could also mean “his accuser”.

بِسَبَب تَرويجِهِ إيّاها…

…because of his promotion of it

And here, instead of a verb or active participle, we have a verbal noun (i.e. ترويج) with a possessive pronoun (ـه). Verbal nouns, as their name indicates, have verbal meanings. إيا comes in to carry the direct object ـها so the possessive pronoun (ـه) and object pronoun (ـها) aren’t fighting for space at the end of ترويج.

I hope that was useful!

And if you missed the memo, I’ve created a downloadable (and printable) resource (the first of many hopefully!) with the triliteral verb forms I-XV and the quadriliteral forms I-IV, plus their derivatives. Access it here!

!إلى اللقاء