Yaa hala! Right I don't want to talk with you about a structure that we can use for describing things, what we call a
'false iDaafa,' or الإضافة غير الحقيقية.
If you've study Arabic for any length of time,
you'll know that إضافة structures are absolutely
everywhere, and I'm operating on the assumption here that you are already familiar with 'real' iDaafas,' إضافات حقيقية,
and how they work.
So as you know, you know, in a genuine إضافة an إضافة حقيقية
we have a collection of nouns, and we're describing a sort of possessive
relationship between those nouns. If you're my student, you may have heard me say 'an إضافة can only
have nouns!' Well,
right now we're talking about *fake* iDaafas, in which the first term is actually an adjective. We can
use this construction to make phrases that mean things that sound like
English phrases you might have heard,
Such as 'fleet of foot,' or 'sound of mind.' Those might sound a little bit archaic in English,
I think they do, but in Arabic we use them all the time, in the present day to describe people
and things, and especially to describe personal characteristics of human beings.
That's one case where we hear them all the time. So if we wanted to say
my
darling, my beloved is 'good-hearted,'
well in Arabic we could say
'My darling is good of heart.' That's how we would phrase it. So
something like this:
حبيبي-- no explanation necessary, I'm sure, and طيب القلب
'Good of heart.' The only difference between this and a real إضافة is that طيّب
is an adjective, right? It's a characteristic. It's a word we use for describing things, and we're saying طيّب القلب
'good of heart.'
Otherwise this works exactly like a real إضافة.
If we were going to fully vocalize it,
the first noun would take whatever إعراب it
needed to on the basis of the sentence, and here it would just be the beginning of a خبر,
so we'll be مرفوع, طيّبُ and it wouldn't take 'tanwiin' because it's the first word of the إضافة, and then
the second word of the إضافة would be مجرور, as it always is.
If we want to talk about
a feminine beloved, the difference would be that we would need to change the adjective to reflect
the feminity. So if we were instead talking about حبيبتي
We would just add a 'taa marbuuta'
and
Then instead say طيّبة القلب.
Same principles apply.
Suppose that we want to say something like 'my dad talks a lot.' 'My father talks a lot.' We could just say
والدي يتكلّم كثيراً
Using the conjugated verb. There wouldn't be anything wrong with that. But we could also say
something like 'my father is
much of speech.'
كثير الكلام
A slightly fancier, more interesting way of expressing the same idea. And again, if we were talking about my mother,
instead والدتي
we would just add a 'taa marbuuta'
to describe our feminine noun and we would be good to go.
We can also use it for
abstract concepts. Suppose we wanted to say 'this is a widespread problem.'
Well,
هذه مشكلة
and then we could describe the مشكلة, the problem, as
'wide of spreading.' We could use a مصدر for 'being spread,' and
then we would wind up with
واسعة الانتشار
انتشر is that verb for 'spreading widely' or
'being found in every place,' so we can say 'wide
of spreading.' We couldn't get away with that in English, probably, but in Arabic it's a perfectly acceptable
structure. And there you have it! A 'false iDaafa,' not quite a real 'iDaafa,' but a handy tool for
describing people, places, and things.