Foundation  /  Al-Ājurrūmiyya  /  Lesson 2

How you tell a verb — and what is left over

Materials

• Follow along with this lesson The handout — the text, the parsing, and the notes on one sheet PDF
• The whole book — English Our own translation PDF

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وَالفِعْلُ يُعْرَفُ بِقَدْ، وَالسِّينِ، وَسَوْفَ، وَتَاءِ التَّأْنِيثِ السَّاكِنَةِ. وَالحَرْفُ: مَا لاَ يَصْلُحُ مَعَهُ دَلِيلُ الاِسْمِ وَلاَ دَلِيلُ الفِعْلِ.

Wa-l-fiʿlu yuʿrafu bi-qad, wa-s-sīni, wa-sawfa, wa-tāʾi t-taʾnīthi s-sākina. Wa-l-ḥarfu: mā lā yaṣluḥu maʿahu dalīlu l-ismi wa-lā dalīlu l-fiʿl.

The verb is known by qad, by the sīn, by sawfa, and by the quiescent tāʾ of the feminine.

And the particle is that with which neither the mark of the noun nor the mark of the verb will serve.

Translation by Alyph Academy. We translate rather than reprint: the classical Arabic is public domain, published English translations are not.

Reading notes

• The four signs are tests, not requirements. A word is a verb if it can take one of them; it does not have to be carrying one at the moment you meet it. Half of the verbs in any page of hadith show no sign at all.
• The signs sort verbs by tense as a by-product. Sa- and sawfa attach only to the muḍāriʿ; the quiescent tāʾ only to the māḍī. Qad takes both — and changes meaning depending on which: with the māḍī it confirms (qad qāma, “he has indeed stood”), with the muḍāriʿ it reduces to “sometimes” or “perhaps”.
• The tāʾ that counts is the quiescent one — kānat, sākina, carrying no vowel. The tāʾ of anta or katabtu is a pronoun, not this sign, and the tāʾ in a noun like bint is part of the word.
• The particle is defined negatively, and Ibn Ājurrūm does this deliberately. There is no positive test for a ḥarf; you reach it by elimination. That is not a gap in the definition — it is what a ḥarf is: a word with no meaning of its own until it is attached to something else.
• Between lesson 1 and this one you can now classify every word in Arabic into one of three kinds, using nothing but eight signs and a process of elimination. That is the whole of Bāb al-Kalām, and it is the foundation the next twenty-eight lessons stand on.

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