The perfective (Form I)

Hi everyone!

Over the last few posts we’ve more or less covered everything to do with nouns and adjectives. We’re now going to look at the other crucial sentence component: the verb. We’re going to begin by looking at the perfective (the ماضي). I’m not going to talk much about the semantics of the perfective today because they are broadly the same as in fuS7a. Instead, I’m going to talk about how to conjugate it, looking for now at so-called Form I verbs.

Form of the perfective

The simplest kind of Form I verb to conjugate is on the pattern fa3al, so let’s use it to exemplify the suffixes:

fa3al, as you can see, is well-behaved. Its stem (the form of the verb to which the suffixes are added) is katab all the way through, with the exception of the -et form, where the final e is dropped (katb-). But other verbs are not so straightforward.

Consider the conjugation of وصل wiSel ‘arrive’, a verb on the pattern fi3el:

Here there are two main stems: wSil- (in red) and wiS(e)l-, with the latter deleting its e when followed by a vowel in accordance with the usual deletion rule. But you can see that the distribution isn’t random. When suffixes beginning with a consonant are added, the form is wSil-. With a suffix beginning with a vowel or no suffix at all, it is wiSel-.

A similar distribution holds for all other kinds of verbs. Hollow verbs, for example, all have the form fi3- with consonant-initial suffixes and faa3- elsewhere:

Defective verbs with the shape fa3a behave similarly:

As do defective verbs with the shape fi3i:

And finally, doubled verbs. Note that these are perhaps the most divergent from their fuS7a counterparts, having been remodelled somewhat along the lines of defective verbs:

That’s all for today. Next time we’ll look at how to conjugate the imperfective (مضارع) form.