Masaa' al-kheir!
Right now I want to talk to you about a very common structure in formal Arabic that we
create using the words ما and من. We can use these words to form an expression that means something like
'that which' or 'what in the way of.' It often sounds very strange when we back-translate it into English,
but it's very common in formal in Arabic texts, and it's considered good
style. So in order to create this structure we often need to
think in a slightly more convoluted fashion, or so it can seem in English. If we wanted to
take, for instance number one, 'she wrote all of the information she heard in her notebook,' or let's say 'all the information that
she heard.' That might come in handy a little bit later. What we need to do is take
this section and rephrase it
so that it sounds more like 'she wrote all
that she heard in the way of information.'
And that's going to be how we make this structure work. So, 'she wrote,'
كتبت
'all of'...
...no trouble so far...
'all that she heard...
in the way of information.' So the 'that' is going to be our
ما, and the 'in the way of' is going to be represented by من.
كل ما سمعته...
And here we have a referent, so literally, we're kind of saying 'all that she heard it,'
because that's good style in Arabic, 'in the way of information.'
من معلومات في دفترها.
Seems pretty convoluted, if you are a
first-language English speaker, as I am.
But that's a very normal way to do things. Again the ـه sort of refers back to the ما--
--we won't see that in every sentence, but we will often have a sort of 'dummy
object' after a verb that's bracketed between ما and من. That's called, if you're interested,
The عائد, the sort of 'go-er back-er,' the thing that refers to something that came before.
Let's take another example: 'despite all the advice that I gave him, he didn't succeed.' Well,
'the advice that I gave him,' now, that's the part that
we need to figure out. And again, if we find a 'that' in our English equivalent, that can help us
Figure out where the ما-من construction might be generated. So we want to say something like 'despite
what I gave him
In terms of, or in the way of, advice,'
There again, that's going to be where our ما and
Our من.
So we could phrase it in Arabic...
...I don't have a lot of board here...
بالرغم ما...
I won't complete that sentence, because it's a bit long but can phrase it
بالرغم ما أعطيته من النصائح...
"Despite what gave him
in terms of, or in the way of
advice..." That's how we can phrase that sentence in Arabic. Another example: "The books of hers that I've read
have benefited me a great deal.' So we could say
ما قرأته من كتبها أفادني كثيراً.
So what we've done
is taken this 'the books of hers that I've read,' and rephrased it as
"that which I've read of her books," and
those represent the ما-من pivots. You're probably noticing, if you consider yourself a
stylist in English, that some of these examples in English, again are a little bit iffy. My inner editor is saying to me, "ooh
that is some tortured phraseology. We could make that better." Once again, in Arabic,
this is good style, and it's very compact, you'll notice.
We've added a lot of unnecessary verbiage in this convoluted English
equivalent, but the Arabic is very clean. ما قرأته من كتبها...
Very compact. It's very neat. Very nice. Let's take one last example. "We liked all of the paintings they have in the museum."
So...
"All of the paintings that they have..." we're going to need to say something like
"All that they have in the way of paintings."
So: "in the way of," lots of words,
just one syllable in Arabic. "All that they have..." ما
So,
أعجبنا... "It pleased us," is sort of what we're saying...
...كل ما عندهم من لوحات في المتحف.
So one way that we can deconstruct a sentence like this when we encounter it, is to think about
how we might rephrase it using اسم الموصول, those
الذي/التي/الذين
words that refer back to a noun that occurred previously in the sentence.
We could, if we wanted to,
probably rephrase some of these using الذي or التي and obviate the need to use that ما-من structure.
The nice thing about using the ما-من structure is that it is very Arabic, right?
We can't really... it's tough to come up with an equivalent in English that is stylistically as
elegant. But
for the sake of comprehension, if we encounter a ما and a من that bracket a word and we want to make it comprehensible to ourselves
it might be worth the intellectual exercise to say
كتبت كل المعلومات التي سمعتها...
"She wrote down all of the information that she heard..."
So that's a good way to make it more comprehensible. Notice that
with ما and its عائد, its dummy pronoun. It's typically going to be
grammatically
masculine singular, that's just the way that the ما can work here. But now that we're talking about معلومات and
التي refers to معلومات and
this object pronoun refers back to معلومات, we don't have a ما, we have an actual
noun with an actual gender. It's a non-human plural, right? "Informations," sort of it's a plural noun,
So we're going to need to use ـها instead of ـه here.
But that's a good way to help
decipher these structures when you might encounter them in a text, and
despite its convoluted nature, it is a really great way, once you've gained some control over the structure to
'Arabize' your style. It's a nice little rhetorical flourish that you can include in your own formal writings.