Masaa' al-kheir!
Right now we're going to talk about using اسم الفاعل to create what's called a حال clause.
اسم الفاعل
You'll remember is kind of the active participle, the 'doer' of an action that we can
get in a very regular way by modifying a verb and creating a certain kind of herbal noun. And
a حال clause is something that we use to describe
the state that the subject was in while performing a primary action. Remember that
حال literally means
'state,' like in the formal Arabic greeting كيف الحال-- "how is the state?" is literally what we're saying.
Often in English
for a حال clause, we can get away with using a gerund, the -ing form of a word, in a case like
'the students entered the classroom
dragging their feet and rubbing their tired eyes.'
So that "dragging their feet"
or "rubbing their eyes"
that's something that we could express with a حال clause in Arabic. There are actually multiple ways of
creating حال clauses, but right now we're just going to focus on
using اسم فاعل, because it requires a little bit more
grammatical
precision.
If you'd like to review how to construct اسم الفاعل, we do have a separate video on that that I would encourage you to go and consult.
So if we wanted to say something in
a longer sentence, in Arabic,
we would need to take that is my bag and put it in the منصوب case ending.
Often that will involve
an 'alif' and 'fatha tanwiin,' or sometimes just
'fatha tanwiin' by itself.
We also have a video on
the a منصوب that you can go and consult, if you'd like some review about the different applications of that subject.
Let's take a look at an example. If I wanted to say 'I left the city
heading for my family's house.' I
could do it like this:
غادرتُ المدينة...
And here we have a verb in Arabic,
يقصد
that means
'to aim for, to head for,' in the geographical sense. So 'I left the city heading for my family's house.' Now I want to take
this Form I verb and put it into
the فاعل pattern. So identified the جذر, the root, 'qaaf-Saad-daal,' then I
put it in the فاعل pattern:
قاصد, and the final step is making it منصوب, which I'm going to do
like this:
قاصداً...
بيت أسرتي.
"my family's house," or "the house of my family."
Let's take another example. If you remember the poor... the story of Khalid or Tariq in Al-Kitaab,
whose dad doesn't want him to study literature,
we could say "my father refused, saying that he does not want me to study literature."
رفض والدي...
Now, the Form I verb يقول
is a hollow verb, it has a 'waaw'
as the middle letter of its جذر here, and this is a little bit irregular. With most Form I hollow verbs, that
vowel is actually going to turn into a 'hamza' in the فاعل pattern, so
'My father refused,' رفض والدي... And we're actually going to form the فاعل
participle
قائل
and again we're going to finish it off with the منصوب ending:
قائلاً إنّه لا يريد...
"Saying that he doesn't want..."
Etc.
Let's take an example with a feminine ending. If you want to say that "the
student, the female, the grammatically feminine student studied Arabic, smiling."
We could say it as follows:
درست الطالبة اللغة العربية...
...while smiling.
"Smilingly," if you will. We could take that form VIII verb,
ابتسم
And now you might go back to the other video on اسم الفاعل
for a refresher on how to derive
different forms of اسم فاعل, but what we're going to do here is
turn ابتسم into
مُبتَسِم
and because we're describing a feminine subject here, this grammatically feminine student, we're going to say
مُبتَسِمة
But we still need to add that منصوب, and since we have a 'taa marbuuta' here, our grammatically feminine marker,
We don't have an 'alif,' like in these examples,
we just say مُبتَسِمةً. If we wanted to make any of these subjects plural, or describe the
actions of a group of
people or things, it's very very easy, since most اسماء فاعل take
regular plural endings. We would have to watch out though, because you'll remember that in
فصحى, we have a couple of different
regular endings, depending on whether
the noun is
مرفوع،
منصوب or مجرور.
So for our منصوب,
we're going to need ـين in these examples.
So,
"They all left the city..."
قاصدين, we would say,
بيت أسرته, "their family's house," or
"All the parents and aunts and uncles refused..."
قائلين...
Or if we were referring to a group of
grammatically feminine students, all of them smiling, we could say مبتسمات.
Like that regular plural ending.
In all of these cases, we could probably get away
with breaking up these ideas into shorter
sentences. We could say "I left the city. I
went to my family's house." Or
"My father refused.
He said
that he doesn't want..." et cetera. But
using these حال losses is a great way to create longer, more sophisticated sentences.
It's much more elegant and eloquent than using short, choppy bits of language to express the same ideas.
So when you are studying and applying this structure, make that a goal: to think of
more elegant and sophisticated
ways to glue those ideas together. And that's the حال clause using اسم الفاعل!