Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The Arabic elative has a special inflection similar to that of colour and defect adjectives but differs in the details. To form an elative, the consonants of the adjective's root are placed in the transfix ’aCCaC (or ’aCaCC if the second and third root consonants are the same), which generally inflects for case but not for gender or number. [1]
The collective form, in these cases, denotes multiple items as a class while the plurative denotes them as individuals. Compare, for example, "people" in "People are funny" with "people" in "the people in this room", though in English the same plural form is used for both purposes. Example: In Arabic, for samak, "fish": [4]
Various forms of the demonstrative pronouns occur, usually shorter than the Classical forms. For example, Moroccan Arabic uses ha l-"this", dak l-/dik l-/duk l-"that" (masculine/feminine/plural). Egyptian Arabic is unusual in that the demonstrative follows the noun, e.g. il-kitāb da "this book", il-bint i di "this girl".
Dual (abbreviated DU) is a grammatical number that some languages use in addition to singular and plural.When a noun or pronoun appears in dual form, it is interpreted as referring to precisely two of the entities (objects or persons) identified by the noun or pronoun acting as a single unit or in unison.
Singular denotes exactly one referent, while plural denotes more than one referent. For example, in English: [7] dog (singular, one) dogs (plural, two or more) To mark number, English has different singular and plural forms for nouns and verbs (in the third person): "my dog watches television" (singular) and "my dogs watch television" (plural). [7]
Dual forms that exist in Modern Standard Arabic do not exist in Levantine, the plural is used instead. Because conjugated verbs indicate the subject with a prefix and/or a suffix, independent subject pronouns are usually not necessary and are mainly used for emphasis.
Examples: قَاضٍ qāḍin "judge" (a form-I active participle); مُسْتَشْفىً mustašfan "hospital" (a form-X passive participle in its alternative meaning as a "noun of place"); فُصْحَى fusḥā "formal Arabic" (originally a feminine elative, lit. "the most eloquent (language)"); دنيا dunyā "world" (also a feminine ...
some dialects follow this, some don't. Koranic Arabic allowed for broken inanimate plurals to take broken plural adjectives (W.M. Thackston, An Introduction to Koranic and Classical Arabic, pp. 27-28), and this occasionally occurs in MSA as well (Haywood and Mahmad, A new Arabic grammar of the written language, p. 52).