Ahla wa sahla!
Right now I'm going to talk الفعل الأجوف في المجزوم,
hollow verbs that come after لم in the jussive or مجزوم case in formal Arabic. In this video,
I'm going to assume that you have a good knowledge and understanding of how to conjugate present tense verbs, including present tense
hollow verbs, and that you also have a good understanding of how to use لم and a
فعل مضارع مجزوم
to conjugate a past tense sentence in the negative in formal Arabic.
If you need a refresher on any of those ideas,
we have separate videos that you can head back and take a look at before we start this one. For reasons that I'll explain,
hollow verbs in the مجزوم
case, that modified version of the present tense,
that we use after لم can sometimes drop their middle vowel, depending on the conjugation.
Over here
I've got a chart conjugated for the verb
زار, to visit, in both مرفوع, our regular default normal Arabic
present tense
case, and also in مجزوم.
So here as you can see in مرفوع we have a 'Dhamma' as a case ending
on a lot of our conjugations, and over here we have a sukoon
instead.
If we're constructing a regular affirmative sentence, of course, we're going to use مرفوع
So if we want to say 'he is visiting the city,'
we would say
يزورُ المدينة
And if it were fully vocalized formal Arabic we would have a 'Dhamma' here.
That's just typical with مرفوع.
But now if we wanted instead to say 'he did not visit the city,' in formal Arabic we would need to use that particle
لم
and then
something interesting happens with the يزور. We might think 'okay,
we have يزور, same thing the only thing that needs to change is that we add the 'sukuun.' But then
we have a little problem,
because technically
if we fully localized
this word, the 'waaw' and the 'raa' both have
'sukuun' on them. And the rules of formal Arabic don't allow us to have
two
letters back-to-back that both have 'sukuun.' It's just a rule.
We can't have those consonant clusters. Again, colloquial Arabic is a different story, but in formal Arabic, that's a no-no.
It's just against the rules.
So instead
what we need to do
is
we drop that 'waaw'
and
instead
we retain that 'Dhamma' here that's sort of a substitute for the 'waaw' and
We have لم يَزُر with a short vowel, لم يَزُر instead of
لا يزور with that long 'waaw.'
If you take a look at this chart over here, most, but not all of the conjugations in مجزوم
have dropped that 'waaw' and added a 'sukuun' instead. There are a couple of exceptions.
Here for example in the أنتِ conjugation,
second-person singular feminine, we have that long' yaa' at the end.
So we've dropped that 'nuun' that we would have in مرفوع but we retained the 'yaa' and because
we have the 'raa' afterward with the vowel, تزوري
we don't have the problem of two 'sukuuns'
back-to-back, and that's pretty much the case with every single conjugation that has a 'waaw' as
part of the present tense conjugation
for a particular subject, like
أنتِ or any of the duals or
أنتم or هم
we still have the vowel in the middle. The one exception that's sort of interesting is with the
feminine plural combinations that we would use for groups of human women.
In these cases,
even in the مرفوع, we don't have that 'waaw' because
if we had it, it would violate the same rules of a formal Arabic.
تَزُرنَ if we fully vocalize this أنتنّ conjugation,
if we had a 'waaw' in there,
we would have the same problem: two 'sukuuns' together, so even in مرفوع we skip the 'waaw.'
The same
idea, the same principle, the same
order of operations, works for any other hollow verb that we're going to conjugate in مجزوم.
So if we wanted to use باع
يبيع
instead,
We could do the same thing. We would just need to make sure that that short-vowel substitute matches
the long vowel sound. So if we wanted to say 'she didn't sell the cart,' we could say
لم and then تبيع ...with a long
تبيعُ with a long 'yaa' would be
the مرفوع conjugation, but
we would have to take that 'yaa' and drop it,
And add a little 'kasra.' instead.
In مجزوم:
لم تبِع السيارة. Or if I wanted to say 'I didn't sleep well,'
نام is an interesting verb because it has an 'alif' as part of the present tense conjugation.
So if I wanted to rephrase that idea in the past in formal Arabic, I could say لم...
and then I would take
أنام, and then think, hmm, 'sukuun,' because of
the مجزوم, and there's a long vowel that also has sort of a hidden 'sukuun,' so I need to drop something,
I just drop that long vowel, and I wind up with
لم أنَمْ جيّداً, 'I didn't sleep well.' This works for
derived forms as well. زار and باع and نام are
all form I verbs, but if we have a different form the same principles apply.
We just have to think about what the vowel is that we would be using in the present tense, and make sure that it's
represented as a short vowel
instead of a long vowel if we have two 'sukuuns' bumping up next to each other.
So if we wanted to use the formal verb استطاع to say
'He wasn't able to
attend the party,'
ordinarily
يستطيع with a long 'yaa' would be our conjugation, but with a لم and a مجزوم we would have two 'sukuuns,' so
What do we do? We get rid of that 'yaa,' and we say
لم يستطِع
أن يحضر...etc. 'He wasn't able to attend the party.' Or
if we wanted to say 'you, أنتَ,
didn't choose an apartment yet,' here
we have اختار, يختار, this verb for 'choosing,' and we retain that 'alif' in the present tense conjugation
in مرفوع, but in مجزوم for certain conjugations like أنتَ
We need to turn that 'alif' into a short vowel.
لم تختَر
'fatha ' instead of long 'alif,' and the 'sukuun'... لم تَختَر شقة بعد.
'You didn't choose an apartment yet.' In spoken colloquial Arabics,
لم typically isn't used to negate the past, we're probably going to use ما or that ما-ش combination
So instead of saying لم يزر المدينة
we would say ما زار المدينة or ما زارش المدينة
But as advanced learners and users of Arabic,
control of this little exception when we're negating sentences in the past is expected of us in our formal writing and correspondence.