Prepositional Interrogatives: When Does عَمّا Become عَمَّ?

بَوصَلة

root: ب-و-ص-ل / noun / plural: بَوصَلات / definition: a compass

I wonder if it means anything that “time” is ud in Sumerian and öd in Göktürkçe. Then I think back to my friend telling me that the ancient Egyptians associated east with this life and west with the afterlife; and language and culture start feeling as cyclical as day and night.

Inside one of the pyramids I scrabbled into, I recited some lines from The Epic of Gilgamesh in Sumerian because… well, what else are you meant to do in there?

It was empty and had great acoustics, and I thought it added to the *ancient civilisation vibes* pretty well. Just that the Sumerians were situated further north and a little more east.

Cardinal directions aside, let’s compass an important grammar point that you may or may not have wondered about.

We already know that ما has many meanings. It can be a negation, an interrogative, or a relative pronoun—to name but a few.

And maybe we know that ما can combine with prepositions, giving us combined forms like:

عَن + ما > عَمّا (about that which, about what)
- لا أريد أن أسأل عمّا كانوا يفعلون
- I don’t want to ask about what they were doing

لِـ + ما > لِما (to/of that which, to what)
- تأكيداً لِما جاء في التقرير…
- …in confirmation of that which appeared in the report

في + ما > فيما (in that which, in what; also, while)
- كانت العلاقة بينهما قوية فيما مضى
- the relationship between them was strong in the past (lit.: in that [time] which has passed)

بِـ + ما > بِما (with that which, with what)
- فرحت بما حدث
- she was happy with what happened

مِن + ما > مِمّا (from/than that which, from what; also, which)
- صار الموضوع أهمّ ممّا كانوا يناقشون
- the topic became more important than that which they were discussing

(Note that when عن and من combine with ما, their final ن assimilates with the م of ما, and we end up with a doubled sound: مّ!)

As you can see in the examples above, the combined forms are acting as conjunctions.

But when they act as interrogatives (i.e. particles introducing a question), they lose the alif at the end, replacing it with a fatha. Take a look:

عَمّا > عَمَّ؟ (about what?)
لِما > لِمَ؟ (to what?)
فيما > فيمَ؟ (in what?)
بِـما > بِمَ؟ (with what?)
مِمّا > مِمَّ؟ (from what?)

And that’s why we encounter in the Qur’an, for example:

عَمَّ يَتَسَآءَلُونَ

What are they asking each other about? (78:1)

So, even though question marks aren’t used in the Arabic text of the Qur’an, we know that عمّ is posing a question.

(In MSA, of course, we’d see the question mark too!)

And it doesn’t stop there. Look at the other interrogatives we’ll find in the dictionary:

إلى + ما > إلامَ؟ (towards what?)
عَلى + ما > عَلامَ؟ ([based] on what?)
حَتّى + ما > حَتّامَ؟ (until what?)

Cool, right?

It does feel good to get my eyes away from my 180 pages of PhD-chapter-planning-and-research to focus on something else for a while. Yes, 180. They should just let me publish my notes at this point.

Anyway, I hope this post was useful! Do let me know if there are other grammar topics you’d like to see covered.

!مع السلامة