Marhaba! Right now, we're going to talk about
similarity in Arabic. That is, how to express
similarities. In English, we often use the word 'like.' We can say 'x is like y,' 'this cooking is just like
my mother's,' or
'my brother is like my sister, but not like my dad.' Things like that. In Arabic,
we have a couple of different particles that we can use to express those ideas, and each of them
requires sort of specific
grammatical
stipulations. So we're going to be focusing on three of them today. We've got مثل, كـ, and كما.
مثل is a word that you probably have seen before. It,
technically, it is a noun, and we say that
something is 'like'
whatever it is. مثل is technically the first word in an إضافة.
So if I wanted to say 'I want to study medicine like my mother,' I could express it this way:
أريد أن أدرس الطب مثل والدتي.
So here I have مثل followed by a noun, and technically,
just so you know, we have an إضافة here.
مثل can be followed by a noun or a pronoun.
So if we were already talking about my mom, and how much I admired her, and wanted to be like her,
I could say instead, 'I want to study medicine, like her.'
And to say 'like her' instead of 'like my mother,'
I could instead
express it as
مثلها.
where the ها refers back to
هي, 'my mother.'
Pretty simple. We have some flexibility.
كـ is a little more rigid. كـ is a slightly more formal
way to phrase it. We might hear
مثل .in colloquial speech
Levantine Arabic uses متل, where the 'thaa' becomes a 'taa,' but كـ
sounds a little more
formal, written, refined.
And كـ must always be followed by an actual noun. We can't
attach a pronoun to it.
That's another wrinkle. كـ always attaches to what follows. So we could express this same idea
using كـ instead,
with والدتي. We could say
أريد أن أدرس الطب كوالدتي.
But what we couldn't do is say
"أريد أن أدرس الطب كها."
It doesn't really work, doesn't quite follow the rule.
Another
place, another circumstance where we see كـ a lot is
when we are hearing
examples or lists of examples.
Think of the situations where you would use
'such as' in English. So we could say 'she lived in the middle east for a long time, and
visited many countries,'
like, or such as Jordan and Lebanon and Egypt." 'Such as...' and then we have a list of countries.
So, we would phrase it like this.
My example sentence was so long that I was trying to remember the English that I said that I was composing the Arabic.
But I think I got a pretty right.
سكنت في الشرق الأوسط لمدة طويلة وزارت بلاداً كثيرة كالأردن ولبنان ومصر.
So, 'she lived there a long time and she visited a lot of countries,
such as or, including, or like...
Jordan and Lebanon and Egypt. That is a context where كـ would be a very natural
word to use in Arabic.
Our final
particle our final words that I want to talk about is كما.
And كما is a special particle that we use for introducing a new
verbal sentence, a جملة فعلية, as we call it in Arabic. To put it different,
after كما we need a verbal sentence. We need a جملة فعلية.
We can't begin our next sentence or our next clause with a noun.
If I wanted to say, for example,
'we will graduate this year, as you know,' or 'like you know,'
I would phrase it this way in Arabic.
We will graduate this year, as you know.
سنتخرّج هذه السنة كما تعرف.
"As you know."
So here, تعرف is
a جملة فعلية, right? It's a complete verbal sentence. It happens to be a very short one, but "you know"
is a complete, sentence-length idea, تعرف, in Arabic.
So it satisfies the requirement of كما. We can use any tense after كما,
so if you've been following a certain
Arabic textbook soap opera, we could also say in فصحى, for example,
'Khalid studied business, like his father wanted.'
I guess it was 'business administration.'
إدارة الأعمال كما أراد والده.
So here when we're saying 'as his father wanted.' or 'like his father wanted,' we have كما
followed by
a جملة فعلية that starts with the فعل أراد.
These rules
tend to function about the same when we're dealing with colloquial Arabic. So if you're studying Egyptian or Levantine,
In Levantine, we would say متل, with a 'taa' to express the idea of 'like,' or
زيّ in Egyptian, and the same operations are true. We could say that
زيها,
زي أمّي or متل أمي, it would work the same, and
instead of كما what would be most natural in the colloquial dialects would be to just tack
ما
onto the colloquial way to express 'like.'
So if we were saying in Levantine, 'like his father wanted,' I could say
متل ما كان بدّه,
as he wanted, or
زي ما كان عاوز
in Egyptian. But the principle remains the same. We kind of need that ما as
the glue to
Introduce a verbal sentence. It's not negating here. It's just a clue that
the next bit is going to be a verb, it needs to be a verb when we're expressing that idea of
similarity.