Mar7aba!
Right now, I'm going to talk about an alternative way to construct the superlative in Arabic,
Which we call
وزن فُعلى
You're probably familiar with the most common way to construct a superlative in Arabic, which we call
أفعَل التفضيل.
And if you need a refresher on أفعل التفضيل
there's a separate video just on that, that you can go back and take a look at.
أفعَل is the most common way to construct basic superlatives in Arabic; we
take an adjective like فصيح or كبير or وسيط or عظيم and we put it into that
أفعَل pattern: we extract the root, and we put it in there. So from فصيح we get أفصَح, eloquent, even more eloquent, or 'the most eloquent.'
وزن فُعلَى is a superlative
that we use only for describing
grammatically
feminine things. In modern usage
It tends to be limited mostly to certain fixed words and expressions,
but it's good to be able to recognize it when we see it and
understand what's going on, so
what we're going to do right now is take a look at some of these examples and some fixed constructions where we're likely to see
فعلى
instead of
أفعَل التفضيل, that more normal construction that we might expect. فصيح, as I said, an adjective that means
'eloquent,' as in 'eloquence of speech,' and
ordinarily if we were describing someone or something that was even more, or the very most eloquent, we would say أَفصَح
but if we put it into
فعلى that وزن instead we would get
فصحى as in that phrase you probably know العربية الفصحى
"The most
formal Arabic,' what we use when we want to talk about formal Arabic or modern Standard Arabic. العربية الفصحى
كبير, an adjective you probably know, and ordinarily if we're talking about something even bigger, we would say أكبر but
certain situations require us to use وزن فعلى as in, if we're talking about
'Greater Cairo,' the city of Cairo and its environs, we would say
القاهرة... you wouldn't say القاهرة الأكبر. Probably we would say
القاهرة الكُبرى
That's just convention. What we tend to say. وسيط, meaning kind of middle or 'medial,'
We would get أوسَط
ordinarily you probably recognize that from الشرق الأوسط, 'the Middle East.' We're actually saying
'The Middle-est East,' it's sort of a funny use of a superlative,
But again, it's just convention. But if we want to talk about 'the Middle Ages,'
We would say
العصور الوُسطى
since عصور is plural, 'ages,' not just one age, it requires,
typically, a feminine adjective. And here again, just because of convention,
We wind up saying العصور الوُسطى instead of العصور الأوسط.
Last example: عظيم,which is an adjective That means 'great,'
Ordinarily, we would render it أعظَم in modern Arabicو if to talk about something 'even greater' or 'the very greatest,' but
if we're talking about 'Great Britain,'
convention dictates that we say
بريطانيا العُظمى
And
that's pretty much it. As I said, typically we tend to encounter this in fixed phrases and
fixed expressions. It would not be
incorrect, for example to talk about being 'the oldest girl' or 'the youngest girl' in a family and say
البنت
الكبرى
instead of
أكبر بنت or البنت الأكبر
or if you want to say the youngest,
البنت
الصغرى
Those constructions are allowed. If we use them in
our normal speech, or our normal writing, it might give us a certain very formal
classicizing flavor, it could affect how your speech or your writing is perceived.
Technically, though, grammatically speaking,
we could do that. That's an acceptable variation. And again, for us, says learners of Arabic,
the most important thing is that we have our eyes peeled so that when we see one of these فُعلى
constructions, we understand what they mean.