Whilst making no claims to be either a proper dictionary, complete, comprehensive or particularly well-formatted, today we’d like to present a 62-page set of wordlists compiled under the title Team Nisreen Syrian Vocab! The wordlist was adapted from one initially prepared by Rob Goulden and Simon Daraman.

This should probably have come much earlier, but better late than never! Possibility ممكن mumken/mémken This one literally means ‘is possible’ and is usually best translated as ‘can’, ‘could’ or ‘might’ depending on context. As an auxiliary, it is followed by a subjunctive verb: ممكن تروح معنا اذا بدك mémken @truu7 ma3na iza béddak – you can go with us if you want بتعرف انه الواحد احيانا ممكن يطلع خلقه bta3ref énno ilwaa7ed a7yaanan mumken yéTla3 khél2o – you know that sometimes, a person can lose their temper… [= that one sometimes their temper can rise] ...

Quadriliteral verbs are those verbs with roots consisting of four consonants. Although these verbs are less common than their triliteral equivalents, there are a lot of them in both fuSHa and colloquial. ‘Quadriliteral’ is not a pattern per se like form V or form VI. Some quadriliteral verbs are derived from nouns or adjectives with four consonants, typically although not exclusively loanwords (تلفن talfan ‘telephone’ < telefoon). Some are derived from native words with triliteral roots but incorporate part of the original pattern of that word (تمركز tmarkaz ‘centre on’ < markaz ‘centre’). Some of them are onomatopoeia (زقزق za2za2 ‘squeak’, فرفر farfar ‘flutter’). Some of them are modified forms of triliteral verbs with an additional sound added, adding an additional nuance to the verb (ترقوص tra2waS ‘dance about, dance around’ < ra2aS ‘dance’). Finally, some of them belong to less common derivational patterns like tfa3lan ‘act like’ (تحيون t7eewan ‘act like a moron’ < 7eewaan, تزلمن tzalman ‘act like a man’ < zalame) or fa3la (طعمى Ta3ma ‘feed’ < Ta3m, فرجى farja ‘show’ < tfarraj 3ala). ...

Rounding out the triliteral verbs, this post is dedicated to verb tables for forms IX and X. Form Xes (sta- verbs) are very common in colloquial as in fuSHa, and have a range of different meanings (I have problems with the old ‘seek X’ trick that people use to work out their meaning but it gets the job done a lot of the time). Form IXes (colour verbs) on the other hand are pretty rare and often have non-form IX equivalents, but I’ve included them here for the sake of completeness. Note that their shape, stress, and suffixes are identical to form VIII doubled verbs although the pattern is different. ...

Forms VII and VIII complete the set used for passive verbs. Almost all form VII verbs (nfa3als) are passive, whilst only some form VIIIs (fta3als) are. Form VIII, in fact, is famously difficult to pin down to specific meanings and is used to derive several different types of verbs. But a number of common form I verbs have form VIII passives. As with forms II to V, forms VII and VIII generally have very little variation in vowelling – that is, almost all form VII verbs derived from the same sort of root will have the same structure and vowelling. There is slightly more variation here however, with e.g. yélta2a and yélta2i both existing. Sometimes the differences imply a difference in meaning. ...

The non-simple (i.e. form II+) verbs have far less variation in their possible vowels. This post presents form II, III, V and VI (fa33al, faa3al, tfa33al, tfaa3al). Many form IIs are causative, whilst forms V and VII are often passives of form II and form III respectively. The only variations on these four patterns are for defective verbs (i.e. verbs whose final root letter is a semivowel). Although hollow roots, assimilating roots etc can form verbs on these patterns, they appear with semivowels patterning as normal consonants: walla3, twalla3, shaawar, tshaawar etc. ...

This ~bonus bonus bonus~ post is pretty self-explanatory, I think. All forms given here are Syrian – minor variations occur in other dialects. This is not a comprehensive list of all of the possible conjugation patterns of Syrian. Every Arabic verb has a present vowelling (e.g. yéf3al) and a past vowelling (e.g. fé3el). Most verbs pair a present vowelling with a past vowelling according to predictable patterns – most fé3el verbs are yéf3al verbs in the present, for example, and most fa3al verbs are either yéf3el or yéf3ol verbs in the present. There are a not-insignificant number of verbs, however, which have unpredictable or unusual pairings of a present and a past vowelling. Only a dictionary or native speakers can provide this information. Nonetheless, any verb which has fa3al vowelling in the past will conjugate in the past like katab here. Likewise, any verb which has yéf3al vowelling in the present will conjugate like yét3ab here. ...

هلأ بدي اسألك سؤال. مين اكتر, نحنا ولا هنن؟ halla2 béddi és2alak su2aal. miin aktar, né7na wélla hénnen? I want to ask you a question. Are there more of us or more of them? miin aktar? – Unlike in (at least my) English, you say straightforwardly in Arabic ‘we are [X number]’, ‘we are many’, as opposed to ‘there are X of us, there are a lot of us. ...

7abiibi ana shaakke énnak 3am t7aaki banaat gheeri Babe I’m worried you’ve been talking to other girls… shaakke is the feminine active participle of shakk yshékk, which you probably originally learnt as ‘doubt’. It doesn’t quite line up with ‘doubt’, though, since you can say (as here) shaakek énnak 3am @tkhuunni (for example) – ‘I’m suspicious that you’re cheating on me’, which has the opposite meaning to ‘I doubt you’re cheating on me’. ...

Counting irregular verbs in any language is a kind of arbitrary process, since ‘irregular’ often means ‘not conjugating according to the most common patterns’ (even though a pattern may exist shared by large numbers of ‘irregular verbs’). In studies on Arabic the term very rarely appears because the tendency is to categorise all verbs which conjugate according to a pattern that appears with multiple verbs as regular. You can do this in colloquial, too, since the vast majority of verbs conjugate in a predictable way according to a pattern shared by all other verbs of a similar shape. ...