Ahlan wa sahlan! Right now we're going to talk about demonstrative pronouns in Arabic,
or what we call اسم الإشارة. The examples we’re going to use in this video
are MSA, Modern Standard Arabic, فصحى We're going to talk in the next video a
little bit more about the particularities of Egyptian and Levantine dialect, but
the principles are very similar, so I would encourage you, no matter which
variety or varieties you're studying, to watch both videos because conceptually
it's going to help you out. So in Modern Standard Arabic, we have a couple of
different pronouns that we use to express the idea of 'this' in phrase or in
a sentence, right? We could say 'this test is easy,' or 'this building is beautiful,' or
we could also say 'this test,' or 'this building,' right, as a phrase, not a
complete sentence. If we're talking about something that's grammatically masculine,
we're going to say هذا. If we're talking about something grammatically
feminine, we're going to say هذه
and if we're talking about plurals, we're going to use
هؤلاء. Remember that in فصحى, and in dialect, we're only going to use
this plural form to refer to groups of people, right? Non-human plurals are
grammatically feminine in every way, as we're going to see in some of these
examples. So as I said we can use these when we're building sentences, or just
phrases. So let's take a look at some examples. Here we have هذه مدينة كبيرة
And this is a complete sentence, this is a complete جملة اسمية in Arabic, it
has a مبتدأ, right, a subject, and a خبر, a predicate, roughly equivalent. So
هذه he is going to be our مبتدأ, 'this,' and then we have our implied 'is,'
because we don't have a conjugated verb for 'to be' in the present tense, and
then مدينة كبيرة is our خبر. The information. So 'this, (imaginary is), this is
a big city. Notice that this is indefinite, right? If we add a definite article and
say هذه المدينة الكبيرة, it's a phrase. 'This big city...' but we don't
have a complete sentence, right? We're waiting for the خبر, or we're waiting
for the news, the information. So we can... Some other examples: هذا مطعم لبناني
'this is a Lebanese restaurant,' مبتدأ, خبر,
هذا المطعم اللبناني...
what about it? Maybe it's great, maybe it's lousy, we don't know, because we
don't have a complete sense yet. We can of course use these phrases as part
of a complete sentence, we can add a خبر and make all of this the مبتدأ.
The subject, right? هذه المدينة الكبيرة... let's suppose we want to say 'this
big city is beautiful,' then we could add
جميلة and then that one adjective which agrees, right, with مدينة, is
indefinite, like most خبر are, most predicates are, and that's how we know
that it's the news, the information, the خبر. Another example, right هذه بيوت قديمة.
'These are old houses.' Remember, بيوت is one of those broken
plurals, but it takes that feminine ending, right, because it's non-human.
We're not going to use the human pronoun. We're going to say هذه بيوت قديمة.
هذه البيوت القديمة, 'these old houses'
let's suppose we want to say they're small, right? Then we would add صغيرة.
Now we have a complete sentence with a مبتدأ and a خبر.