Lower Intermediate - The Arabic Root System

This is excellent. Thank you! :-)

In my Arabic class, we are being taught about type I, type II, type III... - type X verbs, which are defined by the root of the words. Do you guys know about this system? I'm just checking that this classification system is widely known. If you are familiar with "Al Kitaab fii ta3llum al-Arabiyya" it is discussed in Chapter 14, page 250.

Hi Jenkki, I'm not familiar with that system but I imagine it's about adding letters to the root to create various types of words and verbs

Yes, Ehab, that's correct. I just checked Wikipedia, and it seems even there you find reference to this system. They have a table here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_grammar
called "Formation of derived stems ("forms")", and for present tense, it goes like this (example for the verb فعلَ):

I fa'ala
II fa''ala
III fa'ala
IV 'af'ala
V tafa''ala
VI tafa'ala
VII infa'ala
VIII ifta'ala
IX if'alla
X istaf'ala
XII if'aw'ala

I didn't realize there are 12 derived types... in our book, it only has 10.

That's the advantage you have in learning Arabic as a native speaker... don't have to do all this rocket science to understand the grammar ;-)

Nice lesson. I think it could well be classified as beginner level since it is very clear and most of it is in English.

Charles

Great one! It is nice to repeat some grammar which I already learned sometime in the past and had (almost) forgotten about ;) Excellent practice!!!
Well done and keep it up please!
Na7la

you guys are soooooo good....smile.

Request for clarification - in this podcast I believe you say that making an intermediary letter silent can essentially make words into gerunds ("going," etc.) as a pattern. Precisely which letters should become silent? Haven't been able to figure that one out, despite having listened to the examples a few times.

I was just reading more about roots in my Al Kitaab book, and they say that the Arabic for "root" is: جذر not المصدر. Actually, the meaning of المصدر is gerund, according to Al Kitab.

The information you found in your course book is perfectly correct, jenkki. You'll find exactly the same information in any good Arabic grammar.

Great lesson, guys. Very clear summarizing of a potentially confusing topic.

A useful lesson. These formations seem to be almost engineered, more so than eg broken plurals, although there are patterns there too, suggesting Arabic was systematised by scholars at an early time. It makes me wonder whether this is characteristic of the family of Aramaic languages (of which I'm totally ignorant!) or specific to Arabic.

what a beautiful language..

أحب العربية

Thank you for another interesting lesson.^^
Arabic root system is a really intriguing topic. And it does often help me to guess meanings of new words! I wonder is there any other languages like this? Raw3ah :exclaim: