Difficult participles: Verbs of sense, feeling and ability

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:

As you can see, the distinction being made here is basically the same as with continuous participles (or between the English simple present and continuous in other contexts): the participle refers to an ongoing, relatively time-delineated state.

The same principle applies to verbs of sense. The only difference here is that where English generally requires two words – ‘can see’, ‘can hear’, etc – the idiomatic choice in Arabic is just to use the verb of sense on its own. This makes verbs of sense quite similar to verbs of ability:

Note that for North Levantine speakers, the participle of verbs of ability and sense – but not of other verbs discussed in this post – can be replaced by a continuous with 3am:

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