Masaa' al-kheir!
Right now, we're going to talk about colors in Arabic, what we would call in Arabic ألوان. The singular for
'color,' the noun, is لون.
Colors are adjectives, of course, and
the thing about colors in Arabic
is that some of them function in a relatively unique pattern that's rather different from other
adjectives that you may already be familiar with.
Typically in Arabic color adjectives fall into one of two categories. As you can see over here,
We have two separate
charts. These color names, by the way, on the right, have been determined across a couple of studies
to be the most common across languages. Arabic has as rich of vocabulary for describing
color as any other language, but for the sake of brevity, these are the examples that we're going to be working with today.
And we have a pretty neat sample of both kinds. In this lower chart,
you'll notice that each color adjective
has a
'yaa' with a 'shadda' at its end, and that's because all of them are
'nisba' adjectives. We have a separate video on 'nisba' adjectives that you can go back and check out if you'd like a refresher, but basically
they function along the same pattern.
We have that 'yaa' at the end. If we wanted to describe something
grammatically feminine as 'pink,'
We could call it
ورديّة
with a 'taa marbuuTa' at the end to agree with the feminine noun. Like all nisba adjectives, or
most of them anyway,
each of these words refers back to a noun. So when we're saying برتقالي,
just as in English,
we're saying 'orangish,' 'orangey,' the color of the fruit, an orange.
بنّي comes from the word بنّ, which is an old word in Arabic and some other Semitic languages meaning 'coffee,' so 'brown' in Arabic is 'coffee colored.'
بنفسجي the word بنفسج is
'violet,' as in the little flowers. رمادي , رماد is ash, so رمادي, something
that's grey is something that's 'ashy-colored.' Again,
all of these nisba adjectives work exactly like the nisba adjectives that you already know and have probably already been working with.
Where it gets different is
with the colors we see up at the top here. They function in a slightly different pattern.
If you take a look at these examples, masculine singular examples, they all
follow the same pattern the same وزن in Arabic, وزن أَفعَل.
So أسوَد, 'black,' أحمر, 'red,' أصفر, 'yellow,' etc.
For feminine adjectives instead of adding a 'taa marbuuTa' at the end like we would with most other adjectives,
we have a separate vowel pattern and
we add a couple of extra things at the end. So if I were talking about something
yellow, let's say a car,
سيارة
Instead of taking أصفر, the masculine form, and adding 'taa marbuuTa,' I instead
dropped that first 'alif' with 'hamza,' and then add an 'alif and a 'hamza' at the end:
سيارة صُفراء
'a yellow car.'
And in the plural, they get another, third pattern, which is
predictable, even if it's unique to these color adjectives.
صُفر، سُود، حُمر،
etc. So we have a kind of confluence of vowels
We still can rely on the pattern, but it's not quite the same as other adjectives.
We do also get
adjectives that aren't color adjectives in this pattern and they function in exactly the same way.
A couple of examples that you might actually encounter in real life are
the words in Arabic for
'blonde' or 'fair-skinned,' and
'dark,' or 'olive-skinned.'
أشقر in Arabic means 'light-complected,' and أسمر
means dark-complected.' You get a whole lot of
adjectives, some of which are very archaic, and some of which are relatively common and still in use, from that أَفعَل pattern.
So let's take a look at a few examples. If we wanted to say 'they live in a yellow house,'
we would write
يسكنون في بيت أصفر.
Just like all other adjectives, our
adjective, our color adjective, goes after
the noun it's describing, and it also agrees with its noun in terms of
definiteness, so 'they live in a yellow house,' بيت أصفر.
No 'alif-laam' on either word.
if I wanted to say, 'I bought
the red car,' as opposed to all of the other colors that were available to me at the lot,
I could say
اشتريت السيارة الحمراء.
Again, even though سيارة is feminine with a 'taa marbuuTa,' because حمراء the color adjective operates on a slightly different pattern,
the 'alif' and the 'hamza' at the end
indicates that the adjective is feminine. I'm never going to see a 'taa marbuuTa' on the end of these adjectives.
Just like other adjectives you might know too, if
we are talking about a collection of non-human objects, non-human plurals, and describing them,
everything else about them in the sentence--in formal Arabic the rule is a little bit
hazier in colloquial Arabic--
but in formal Arabic everything about non-human plurals is grammatically feminine in the rest of the sentence. So if we wanted to say
'we sat in the white chairs,'
we would say
جلسنا في الكراسي البيضاء.
So that adjective looks like it's feminine singular according to our pattern here, but
we're describing multiple chairs, the chairs are non-human, so they're going to take a feminine singular adjective.
one last note
We do have plural patterns for all of these colors
but
typically it's rare--there aren't too many contexts where we're going to be describing
people as
blue for example. Although we could use
سود or بيض to talk about 'white people' or 'black people,' that's a fairly common usage.
But for the sake of argument--oops! This will allow me to correct a typo,
because I repeated 'yellow,' twice, this should be خُضر.
So if I wanted to talk about
multiple green people and say
I' saw the little green men last night,'
that would be an appropriate use, since ostensibly I'm talking about the people.
شاهدتُ الرجال الصغار الخضر ليلة أمس.
So there would be a very specific context, where it might be appropriate to use خُضر,
the plural form of 'green,' even though people, human beings, are not typically green.
Similarly I have to use the broken plural for صغير, 'small' or 'little,' because again,الرجال, the men that I'm referring to, are
human beings. Or are they? In any case one of the very rare circumstances where we might 104 00:09:13,990 --> 00:00:00,000 Need to use خضر, that adjective, to refer to a group of human beings.