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Can I ask you why you inserted “qad” in here? Does it give the meaning that the action took place earlier in time?
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Can I ask you why you inserted “qad” in here? Does it give the meaning that the action took place earlier in time?[/quote]
I used the word(qad), because of the action, it takes neither, it can be yes or not!
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Can I ask you why you inserted “qad” in here? Does it give the meaning that the action took place earlier in time?[/quote]
I used the word(qad), because of the action, it takes neither, it can be yes or not![/quote]
Marhaba,
Doesn’t “qad” have to be used with fi’l al-mudâri’ (imperfect) in order to denote an uncertainty? That is what we were taught.
Zeynelabidin, One of the things with which I had the most difficulty in learning Arabic (my mother tongue is English) was figuring out which prepositions were to be used where. I honestly think that the way I finally became comfortable enough using them (which is not to say that I mastered them) that my speech reached normal conversational speed was through memorizing the Qur’an and extrapolating from its usages, which leaves me in the position of being a major ‘Fus7alizer’ in my dialect. That’s okay, though; my main reason for learning Arabic was to be able to read the important Islamic texts, and they are most definitively Fus7a documents, so my main objective has been, wa al 7amdu lillah, realized. Being able to speak and understand Moroccan dialect is mere icing on the cake for me. I came to know Moroccan rather than another dialect via my qadr of marrying a Casawi.
The ‘qad’ you are asking about is, in my understanding, for emphasis. Your original sentence did not absolutely need ‘qad’, but it did need the preposition ‘3ala’. Why? Because the verb ‘7 S l’ (in that meaning; you can actually say ‘7Sltini’ with the meaning ‘you caught me’, but that is quite a different meaning) can not act upon its object without going through a preposition. In English, we can say, “I earned a ten out of ten.” In Arabic, we can not say it with the exact same wording. The semantic unit (sorry about the possibly confusing use of that phrase) expressed by ‘I earned’ is expressed in Arabic by, “7Sltu 3ala”, which, as you can see, is a verb that includes its own subject, “I” and makes its way to the object via use of the preposition, ‘3ala’.
Now, ‘3ala’ itself is difficult to define properly in English due to the fact that we English speakers would use its literal equivalent in some contexts and use an equivalent which is not actually literally the same word in other contexts. For instance, we say, 'Assalamu Alaikum". The first half of the second word is ‘3ala’. English translation yields, “Peace be upon you”, so in this context it means ‘upon’. If we use the same preposition in, ‘wa 3ala al mawluwdin lahu…’ we need to translate it as, ‘and the duty of he to whom one is born’. Where is our preposition, (3ala/upon), in there? It is being expressed by the larger unit; ‘it is the duty of/it is incumbent upon/it is the responsibility of/burdened with’ are all potential translations of this ‘3ala’; the derivation of this meaning from ‘upon’ is pretty transparent.
English prepositions are also, so I am told, notoriously difficult to apprehend the distinctions amongst. This is no doubt due to the arbitrary nature of assignation. Is your dinner plate placed on the table or upon the table, or even, possibly, atop the table? Is that, then, ‘fowq’ or ‘3ala’? Do you live at such and such an address or across from such and such a building or in that house? Is that, then, ‘3ala’, ‘amama’, or ‘fiy’? Is the bird’s nest in the tree or on the branch or above the third bough?..
Hope I’ve been of some use; it’s lousy to be useless, ya know.
…and as for the meanings of ‘qad’, they are many. If you are able to get a copy of “Wright’s Grammar” you will have everything you could possibly dream of to confuse the heck out of yourself with. It is a famous and quite accurate reference book on Arabic, originally composed, if I am not mistaken, in German. The Arabic title of it is. "Ashshaamil fiy qawa’id al Arabiyyah’, and it may be available in Dutch. Allow me to stress that this is a REFERENCE book; it is not a book you would want to sit down with and try to learn Arabic from. You have to have quite a good grip on the language already for it to be useful to you, but it does explain, in exhaustive detail, every rule you might ever need to know about Arabic grammar. It has quotes from the Qasa’id and the Qur’an as well as other examples taken from classical texts.
I don’t know what book you are using in your class. When I was at University we used Elementary Modern Standard Arabic by Abboud, Attieh, McCarus, et al. I was actually blessed to be a student of Peter Abboud (whom I miss dearly), who is one of the most famous Professors of Arabic in the USA. The EMSA method is to have the purpose of the lesson written out in English and then conduct the classes only in Formal Arabic. The written as well as the oral exercises are given only in Arabic. We weren’t allowed to speak any English, German, Palestinian, Egyptian…nothing at all but formal Arabic in the classrooms and in the Department itself. Those strictly enforced rules made the only means of surviving the program acquiring the ability to express yourself and understand others via Fus7a. When the time came to undertake upper division courses only the die hard ultra determined students remained.
The books are published by Cambridge University Press and are not more than, perhaps, thirty dollars per volume. Whatever book you are using, I suggest that you get a hold of the EMSA books as well. They present the grammar in a unified and orderly fashion; nothing is accidentally left out. That way, you aren’t jumping around from words having to do with cooking one week to vocabulary of school rooms the next. Dr. Abboud’s PhD is in linguistics, and the group which produced the EMSA series went about it by figuring out a core vocabulary and building upon it, lesson after lesson. Some have criticized the series as being too heavy on grammar too early on. It does present, for instance, the mamnu3 min aSSarf in the very early chapters, but by being made aware of these somewhat arcane aspects of grammar you find yourself better prepared to take on the language; the series provides your mind with a place for everything and everything in its place.
When I start talking about Dr.s Abboud and Attieh I find it hard to stop myself; sorry for the sheer length of the post.
WARNING WARNING WARNING; this comment is meant only for those who are trying to learn Formal Arabic as well as Darija; if you have no interest in Formal Arabic, spare yourself and do not read the comment.
Being a stickler for details, I thought I would point out…
When you use “la annahiyya lil jins”, which is “the ‘no’ of absolute negation”, “tanween”, (the English word for which is “nunnation” and means exactly what that coinage implies, “n-ing”)…tanween is intentionally dropped from the word’s ending and replaced by a single fathah.
Nunation (tanween) can only occur at the end of a word. The word must be a noun, (it is not possible to ‘nunnate’ a verb) and there are classes of nouns which are not able to take ‘nunnation’ (an example of which would be women’s names; there is no such thing {unless you are using them as adjectives rather than proper names} as a ‘Karimatun’, nor an 'Aichatun" nor even an Abu Hurairatin).
So, where am I going with this? First of all, I acknowledge that this is a site for learning colloquial North African Arabic. Native speakers of that language are not ‘wrong’ when they spell the words in question with ‘alif’s,’; they are correctly portraying Darija in spelling the words that way.
I am pointing this out for the benefit of those who are attempting to construct an outline of how MSA works and fits together… this is completely irrelevant and should be ignored by those of you who are only interested in learning Darija.
The ability of languages to express shades of meaning is variable. Arabic is a language which allows you to be ambiguous or razor sharp precise. ‘la annaihiyya lil jins’ is an instrument with which one can totally eliminate the possibility of one’s message being misconstrued in that it, by definition, claims exclusivity. What does that mean? It means that there are many different 'la’s in the language. Not every ‘no’ means exactly the same thing. This particular one is an emphatic instrument which draws your attention to the fact that, whatever is being said, the speaker really means it and is in no way uncertain of what he is communicating to you.
An example of this ‘no of absolute negation’ is found in the saying, “No thanks is necessary to one who has only done his duty”. So, in Formal Arabic, when you say, “La shukra 3ala waajib”, you are not glossing over the nunnation of ‘thanks’, but you are skipping the nunnation of ‘duty’, as ‘duty’ is the last word in the sentence and therefor is, according to the rules of the language, (unless you are connecting it in one breath with the following sentence), properly pronounced by cutting off your pronunciation of the word just before you reach the last vowels.