Hi everyone! I’ve been slowly working through my original fuS7a to Shami series over the last few weeks to try and update it and make it a bit more readable. I’ll be posting the results as a new series of posts over the next couple of months. As the title suggests, I’ll generally be assuming a reasonable basic knowledge of fuS7a, since more or less everyone who learns a dialect will have that knowledge. But as before, I’ll be starting from the absolute basics and working up to more complicated concepts. ...

In this post we’re going to look at two very useful and versatile prepositions: قد ‪2add and على قد ‪3ala 2add. قد ‪2add 2add generally means ‘as much as’. For an English speaker its most useful function is probably to provide an easy way of translating ‘as X as’: ما حدا شاطر قدو maa 7ada shaaTer 2addo nobody’s as clever as him ما بكره شي قد هدول الناس maa bikrah shii 2add hadool innaas I don’t hate anything as much as I hate these people ...

Hi everyone! In this post we’ll be looking briefly at a feature of the Arabic lexicon. Specifically, we’ll be thinking about verbs like the following, which typically correspond to two different verbs in English: Meaning 1 Meaning 2 لبس libes ‘wear’ ‘put on’ عرف 3iref ‘know’ ‘find out’ ‘realise’ نام naam ‘sleep’ ‘fall asleep’ The two different meanings are obviously closely related. The verbs in the first column (meaning 1) all express a state, while the verbs in the second column (meaning 2) express the action that brings that state into being. Now, not all pairs of this kind are clearly distinguished in English. Consider: ...

Hi everyone! Today we’ll be talking about the word عم ‪3am, usually described as Arabic’s ‘continuous’. We’ve already had reason to discuss 3am briefly when talking about the continuous participle, which also sometimes translates English ‘-ing’. In this post we’ll look at its uses and meaning in more detail. What is 3am? 3am occupies a space somewhere between an independent word and a prefix. It’s usually combined with the bare present form (without b-) – although there is quite a lot of regional variation on this point – and is negated in Syrian with maa: ...

Hi everyone! In the last few posts we looked at the resultative and continuous meanings of the participle (as well as some continuous participles likely to be unintuitive for English speakers). In this post we’re going to look at one more possible meaning: the future. This use of the participle is deceptively simple for English speakers. Having learnt forms like جايه jaaye ‘coming’ and رايحين raay7iin ‘going’ as continuous forms, it feels natural to use them in contexts like the following: ...

Hi everyone! In the last two posts we looked at two main uses of the participle: the continuous and the resultative. In most of the examples I gave, these corresponded – roughly at least – to distinctions made in English. In this post we’re going to consider verbs whose participles don’t exhibit this sort of correspondence. These are verbs of sense, feeling and ability. The issue here isn’t so much with Arabic behaving anomalously as with English. In English, verbs like this can generally only appear in the simple present, and have no continuous form. In Arabic, however, they can form a participle. And although the translation in English will generally be the same, the meaning is different: ...

In the last post we looked at the continuous use of the participle. In this post we’re going to look at the other main use, the so-called resultative. This is a very common construction: almost all verbs can form a resultative participle. But it often goes unnoticed by learners because it has no corresponding form in fuS7a. What does ‘resultative’ mean? Like a continuous participle, a resultative participle expresses a state. But in this case, the state in question is the state that results from a verb being completed. It’s probably easiest to get a sense of what this means in practice by provisionally translating the participle using the English present perfect form (‘have Xed’), with which it shares some similarities. Consider the examples on the left and right: ...

You probably already know that participles are used more commonly in Levantine than they are in fuS7a. But pinning down exactly what they are used for is a source of great frustration for many learners. In this post, we’re going to look at just one of the many uses of the participle. But it is a very common use, and the only one which you absolutely cannot do without: those participles that correspond to English forms with the continuous (‘-ing’). ...

This is a quick post about the Levantine passive. Passive verbs are often misidentified by English speakers (English teachers and editors are, if anything, unusually guilty of this). But although people are not always able to point them out, they’re very common in practice. Essentially, a passive construction takes a verb with an object and ‘promotes’ that object to subject, allowing us to delete the original subject and leave it unstated. English passives are formed with either ‘be’ or ‘get’ plus a past participle: ...

Hi, Today we’re going to briefly look at a phenomenon that often causes problems for learners: the distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs. A transitive verb is one that takes a direct object, while an intransitive verb does not. In English, many verbs can have both transitive and intransitive meaning. These ‘ergative verbs‘ have an odd property. When they are used intransitively, the subject is the ‘experiencer’ of the action, but when they are used transitively, it is the object that expresses the ‘experiencer’ and the subject the ’causer’. This is most easily understood from some examples: ...