The مَـ of Place and Time

مَكان

root: ك-و-ن / noun / plural: أَماكِن / definition: place

After 11 weeks, my first semester of teaching is officially over. And I’m reflecting on these past three months as I pack for my upcoming trip, having already tucked James Scanlan’s A Moroccan Journey into my backpack—a pertinent read considering my destination.

One thing that I’ve found myself mentioning to Arabic students across various classes, and something that seemed to spark some aha! moments, is the مَـ of place and time.

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Arabic Synonyms Meaning “Resistance”

ثَلْج

root: ث-ل-ج / noun / plural: ثُلوج / definition: snow, ice

I couldn’t resist wrapping up in all my layers this morning around sunrise to venture out into the garden and ramble through the thick snow blanketing the decking.

My mum handed me some dried remnants of the floral arrangements we’ve had displayed around the house since last month to stick into the somewhat-vase-shaped snowball I had made on the garden table, with some desiccated red rose petals falling picturesquely onto the surrounding white snow.

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Reading Arabic Literature: An Interesting (?) Structure

تَرْكيب

root: ر-ك-ب / verbal noun of form II / plural: تَراكيب / definition: (grammatical) construction

If it seems like the last post in the Reading Arabic Literature series was almost a year ago… that’s because it was, unfortunately. (January, apparently?!)

And this doesn’t mean I haven’t been reading any Arabic literature—because as you might have read in my step-by-step literature translations, like this one—I’ve actually got more than one Arabic novel on the go, thanks to my as-of-yet-not-started and just-applied-for-as-of-Friday PhD. That makes for a mouthful.

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Resource: Arabic Literature Podcast

حَلْقة

root: ح-ل-ق / noun / plural: حَلَقات / definition: episode

I’m rushed off my feet this week and to top it off, I have an important deadline lying menacingly in wait on the footstep of Friday evening when it will, assuredly, catch me off-guard and drag me into the lair of panic that I’ve frequented so often, it has several caffeinated drinks waiting for me.

Still, it’s never too busy for a (short) blog post.

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Verbal Nouns of Hollow Roots

مَصْدَر

root: ص-د-ر / noun / plural: مَصادِر / definition: verbal noun, source

Back in June, when we looked at the different types of Arabic roots, we mentioned that hollow roots are those with either و or ي as the middle letter. Like ق-و-ل and غ-ي-ر.

Verbal nouns (مصادر) derived from hollow roots sometimes follow a different pattern to those derived from sound (regular) roots.

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The Verb يتسبّب and its Prepositions

مُتَنَوِّع

root: ن-و-ع / active participle of form V / definition: various

In one of the examples in Arabic Observations: Words with Antonymic Meanings, we saw how changing the preposition following a verb could produce two completely opposite meanings.

While the meaning of the form V verb تَسَبَّبَ / يَتَسَبَّبُ doesn’t change that drastically, it still shifts depending on the accompanying preposition/s.

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Distance and Perspective

بُعْد

root: ب-ع-د / noun / plural: أَبْعاد / definition: distance, dimension

So I’m back from my one-week solo trip to Istanbul which was perfect on all fronts. To feel so immersed in history, culture, spirituality… and to be there with my thoughts alone… was simply unbeatable.

With every step I took through the palaces, museums, and mosques, and across the bridges over the Golden Horn, and with every breathtaking sweeping view from the city’s rooftops, I felt as though I was stepping back to look at my own life.

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Arabic Observations: The Eye and Other Water Sources

عَيْن

root: ع-ي-ن / noun / plural: عُيون أو أَعْيُن / definition: eye, spring

Here we are with another post in the Arabic Observations series, and this one starts with the word عَين (“eye”).

When you look up عَين in the dictionary and scoot your finger across a little from its first definition, you’ll land on another meaning: “spring (of water)”.

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Form I Active Participles of Geminate Roots

مُضَعَّف

root: ض-ع-ف / passive participle of form II / definition: doubled, geminate

As we saw in the post Arabic Roots: the Different Types, geminate roots are those whose final two letters are the same. Like م-س-س or ح-ر-ر.

When it comes to the form I active participle of geminate roots then, we might expect its pattern to be the same as that of regular, sound roots (i.e. فاعِل)—hence we might expect حارِر as an active participle. But that’s not the case.

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Arabic Observations: الإتباع

إتباع

root: ت-ب-ع / verbal noun of form IV / definition: to make something follow something else

It was a long time ago when I first realised that a linguistic phenomenon that occurs in various languages—like my heritage language, Turkish—can also be found in Arabic.

Now I wish I could remember the exact Arabic example I came across all that time ago, but… alas.

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