Lower Intermediate - She goes elsewhere
Have you ever had the feeling that someone is avoiding you? Sometimes, you find people disappearing from your life, but let's hope it's not because of you! In today's lesson, Mohamed & Ehab go through a dialogue concerning such a topic.
Arabic nouns are divided into two classes: “'aaqil (ﻋﺎﻗﻝ” and “ghayr (ﻏﻴﺮ 'aaqil (ﻋﺎﻗﻝ”. The nouns in the first class are words which denote humans, angels, demons or the Devil. The nouns in the second class are words that denote plants, animals, ideas or inanimate objects.
Since ﻋﺎﻗﻝ means “rational”, the two categories are sometimes labelled “rational” and “irrational” (or “non-rational”), but most native speakers of English are rather bewildered when Arabic grammarians speak of “rational” and “irrational nouns”.
It remains to add that a similar distinction is made in Tamil, a diglossic language spoken in India and Sri Lanka.