Adjectives

Hi everyone!

In this post we’re going to talk briefly about adjectives. If you know your basic fuS7a and have read the last two posts on nouns and number, how adjectives work should come fairly naturally to you. The main difference is that they make far fewer distinctions than in fuS7a. As we will see, not only do they have no case marking, but they also have a far simpler number system than either their fuS7a counterparts or, in fact, than Syrian nouns.

Adjective forms

Adjectives in Syrian have a fairly simple three-way system of masculine, feminine and generic plural. Even better, in most cases these forms are entirely regular. The vast majority of adjectives have a feminine form produced by adding ـة -a/e and a plural formed by adding ـين -iin:

A small list of very common adjectives with singulars on f3iil or fa3iil have broken plurals on f3aal. Almost all f3iil or fa3iil adjectives, with the exception of قديم 2adiim ‘old’, have plurals of this kind:

2af3al adjectives of ‘colour and defect’ have feminines on fa3la (sometimes fa3le) and plurals on fi3^el (although some have irregular plurals):

A handful of adjectives, mostly loanwords, are invariable for gender or number: سادة saada ‘black [coffee]’, كحته ka7te ‘stingy’, طازة Taaza ‘fresh’, etc.

You may occasionally encounter adjectives with the feminine plural suffix ـات -aat. But these are almost never compulsory. We might talk about them again in a later post.

Using adjectives

Adjectives always agree with their noun for number (singular or plural) and, in the singular, gender. Dual nouns typically trigger plural agreement:

When attached to a definite noun, an adjective will also agree for definiteness by adding الـ ⁱl-, which changes shape exactly as it does with nouns:

Note that – as in fuS7a, although this is a point that is often not very well taught – a definite adjective standing alone can take the meaning ‘the X one’ (see my previous post here):

That’s all for today. If you want to keep up with this and other translation/Arabic-related content, follow me on Twitter at Chris Hitchcock (@chm3na).