The لِ and كَ of Distance

هَزّاز

root: ه-ز-ز / adjective / definition: rocking

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Even after ten sweet days in Morocco, there’s nothing like coming back home and falling into the gentle swing of my rocking chair. I rock, and lull my prodding thoughts about the angle of the chair’s swing into silence to make way for some other brain activity.

I planned to write another post today (as is often the case before I reach my keyboard), but my mind rocked back to a topic we touched on a while ago.

In The ذاك Suffix, we mentioned how ذا is a demonstrative, and it indicates something close to the speaker.

We’ll recognise it as a component of common words like هٰذا (this) and ذٰلك (that). And components are key to demonstratives like this, creating layers of meaning in what we assume are basic grammatical particles.

In هٰذا, for example, we have ها (written defectively) as a prefix to ذا—with ها being a particle used to draw attention to something. So هٰذا is almost like saying “look at this thing here!”.

But now let’s bring our attention to two sets of words:

• ذا
• ذاكَ
• ذٰلِكَ

and

• هُنا
• هُناكَ
• هُنالِكَ

We’ve mentioned that ذا refers to something close. We can translate it as “this”.

ذاكَ—where the كَ suffix has been added—refers to something a little further away. It’s like saying “that”.

And then ذٰلِكَ comes—where we’ve added a لِ infix between the ذا (which is written defectively in this word) and كَ—and indicates a further “that”. It’s like saying “that, over there”.

So the ـكَ suffix and ـلِـ infix both add layers to the distance aspect of the word.

Something similar occurs in the second set of words.

هُنا means “here”, referring to a close or surrounding area.

هُناكَ means “there”, as we’re probably very familiar with—where the ـكَ indicates more distance between the speaker and referent.

And then we have هُنالِكَ, which also means “there”—but with the additional ـلِـ, it refers to an even more distant (or metaphorical) “there”.

I wonder if this infixed لِ is a variant manifestation of the emphatic لَ prefix that we see sometimes, or whether this is unrelated.

كَ, on the other hand, we’re used to seeing as either a prefix meaning “as, like” or a pronoun suffix indicating the second person masculine singular—so there doesn’t seem to be much of a relation there (although my mind is hypothesising some).

These aren’t the only components we’ll see in these words, by the way.

The word ذٰنِكَ (found here, in the Qur’an) caught my attention recently. It’s translated as “these (are) two”, so it’s referring to the dual. Are its components, then: ذا, plus the dual indicator انِ, followed by كَ?

Ah, Arabic is like a rocking chair for the mind.

Perhaps there’s a better comparison here, but I like this one so we’re sticking with it.

!إلى اللقاء

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