Arabic Diptotes: الممنوع من الصرف

اِنْتِظار

root: ن-ظ-ر / form VIII verbal noun / definition: waiting

Time and tide wait for no man.

Yesterday was the first day I came across this English proverb. Its meaning resonated, but what really drew me to this phrase was the word “tide”.

You see, I’ve been thinking about the sea a lot lately. Thinking a lot, but writing little. (The eternal state of the PhD student…) And all my thoughts are cut-off sentences that hiccup before they reach a full stop or enigmatically trail off.

There have been some expected yet strangely abrupt changes in my life too. So maybe that’s where my mind is at.

But let me at least try to complete something today. Like this post—a thought planted many weeks ago that I’m determined to see it to its end. Withholding hiccups.

In many of our headline analyses and literature translations (where we analyse vocabulary and grammar in context), we’ve come across words that don’t carry the case endings that we’d expect.

For example, in Arabic Headline Analysis #4, we came across the following phrase:

إلى مُستَقبَلٍ أَفضَلَ

towards a better future

We might assume that أقضل (“better”) here should carry kasratayn—it’s in a noun-adjective phrase with the noun مستقبل (“future”), so they should match in terms of case. But instead, we see a fatha on its final letter.

Technically, مستقبلِ and أفضلَ do match in case. But they differ in case ending.

The reason is that أفضل is a diptote, or—in Arabic—ممنوع من الصرف.

So, what is a diptote?

Well, we know that words like nouns and adjectives in Arabic usually take one of six case endings, depending on their grammatical context:

damma (ءُ) or dammatayn (ءٌ), when in nominative/subject case (مرفوع)
fatha (ءَ) or fathatayn (ءً), when in accusative/object case (منصوب)
kasra (ءِ) and kasratayn (ءٍ), when in genitive case (مجرور)

… but diptotes only have two possible case endings:

damma (ءُ), when مرفوع
fatha (ءَ), when either منصوب or مجرور

That’s right, no kasra nor any form of tanween!

But there are some rules. If a diptote…

has the definite الـ prefix
or is the non-final word in an إضافة (possessive construction)

… then it can take a kasra.

Let’s go back to our example to demonstrate this:

إلى مُستَقبَلٍ أَفضَلَ

towards a better future

Above, أفضل (our diptote) does not have the الـ prefix, nor is it the non-final word of an إضافة, so it can only take diptote case endings. Seeing as it matches the case of the noun (i.e. both are مجرور), أفضل takes a fatha, as per diptote rules.

إلى المُستَقبَلِ الأَفضَلِ

towards the best future

However in this example, أفضل has the definite الـ prefix, so it no longer acts like a diptote. It matches the case ending of the noun it describes (المستقبلِ), which is genitive due to the preceding preposition.

But wait—how do we know if a word is a diptote or not?!

Diptotes fall into certain categories. Let’s go through them:

All female names
- e.g. مَريَم and سُعاد
Many (but not all) male names: especially those derived from other languages
- e.g. يوسُف and حَمزة
Place names: those without الـ at the start or ـات at the end
- e.g. لُبنان and مَكّة
Words on the أَفعَل pattern: including colours in the masculine form, plus comparatives/superlatives
- e.g. أَحمَد and أَزرَق and أَفضَل
Words on the فَعْلاء pattern: including colours in the feminine form
- e.g. سَوْداء and حَمْراء
Adjectives on the فَعْلان pattern (indicating temporary states)
- e.g. تَعْبان and جَوْعان
Many types of broken plurals: usually broken plurals with an added alif
- e.g. زُمَلاء and جَرائِد and أَشْياء and مَصابيح, etc.
Names of the some of the months
- e.g. رَمَضان and مارِس

Wow, that’s a lot to take in.

Fortunately for us, we can identify diptotes easily in the dictionary, as the Hans Wehr uses a superscript ² to indicate them, like this:

(See Reference: A List of Abbreviations in the Hans Wehr Dictionary for more symbols and abbreviations found in the dictionary!)

I hope this post flowed better than my thoughts. I was sending emails whilst doing cardio this morning and it was the least chaotic I’ve felt in a while.

Maybe the tides are changing.

!إلى اللقاء