Passive I

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:

Active	Passive
He’s cooking something up.	Something’s being cooked up.
I’ve tidied the room.	The room has been tidied.
You rewarded me.	I was rewarded.
I blow-dried my hair.	My hair got blow-dried.

English is unusual in allowing almost any verb to form a passive. The Levantine passive is more restricted. Only verbs on particular forms – generally Forms I, II and III and the quadriliteral (four-consonant) form fa3lal – can be passivised. And this is achieved by a change of form, typically to Form VII, V, VI and tfa3lal respectively. Consider the Levantine counterparts to the examples above:

Active	Passive
عم يطبخ طبخة 3am yiTbokh Tabkha He’s cooking something up (Form I).	عم تنطبخ طبخة 3am tinTibekh Tabkha Something’s being cooked up (Form VII).
رتبت الغرفة rattabt ⁱlghirfe I’ve tidied the room (Form II).	ترتبت الغرفة ⁱtrattabet ⁱlghirfe The room has been tidied (Form V).
كافأتني kaafa2ⁱtni You’ve rewarded me (Form III).	تكافأت tkaafa2^et I’ve been rewarded (Form VI).
سشورت شعري sashwar^et sha3ri I blow-dried my hair (fa3lal).	شعري تسشور sha3ri tsashwar My hair got blow-dried (tfa3lal).

A few Form I verbs have passives on Form VIII (fta3al) instead. These are less common than Form VII (nfa3al) forms, and sometimes occur as variants of them. They have to be learnt:

Active	Passive
نسيت المصاري nisyet ⁱlmaSaari She forgot the money (Form I).	المصاري انتسو ⁱlmaSaari ntasu The money was forgotten (Form VIII).

In all the examples given so far, the object being ‘promoted’ has been a normal direct object. Nouns attached to the verb with prepositions can also be promoted using the passive, just as in English (‘a room that songs were sung in’). In this case, however, they are not promoted to full subject. The verb defaults to masculine singular, and the preposition takes the agreement (as in fuS7a):

Active	Passive
حدا نام بهدول التخوت؟ 7ada naam b-hadool lⁱtkhuut? Has anyone slept in these beds?	هدول التخوت اننام فيهن؟ hadool lⁱtkhuut ⁱnnaam fiihon? Have these beds been slept in?
محمد ما حكى عن سامية m7ammad maa 7aka 3an saamiya Muhammad didn’t mention Samia.	سامية ما انحكى عنها saamiya maa n7aka 3anha Nobody mentioned Samia. Samia wasn’t spoken about.

Note that the fuS7a internal passive occurs only in a few set phrases (يرثى له ‘pitiful’, يُعتبر ‘can be considered’, etc), and is not used productively in Levantine at all.

Using the passive

There are two basic common uses of the passive. The first corresponds reasonably closely to English. Where the ‘original subject’ of a verb is not important to the conversation, the passive can be used to dispense with the need to mention them:

انمسكت ع الحدود
nmasak^et 3a lⁱ7duud
I was caught at the border.

انتشل من البحر
ntashal mn ⁱlba7^er
He was rescued from the sea.

This use is less common than its English counterpart (which makes sense when we remember that Arabic is far less free and easy than English with passivising verbs), mainly because Arabic can use changes in word order for the same purpose. The second use, which has no direct counterpart in English, is to express that something cannot or should not be done:

البيض ما بيتاكل هيك
ⁱlbeeD maa byittaakal heek
Eggs aren’t to be eaten like that.
That’s not how you eat eggs.

هي وحدة ما بتتناقش
hayy wa7de maa btitnaaqash
She’s not to be argued with.
You can’t argue with her!

That’s all for now. Next time, we’ll look at some further idiomatic uses of, and alternatives to, the passive. And if you want to keep up with this and other translation/Arabic-related content, follow me on Twitter at Chris Hitchcock (@chm3na).