Ahlan wa sahlan! Right now we're going to talk about ‘broken plural’ patterns in Arabic,
or what we call جمع التكسير. We call them ‘broken plurals’ because we take the
stem, the three-letter the tri- consonantal root of our singular word,
and we break it, and we shift the consonants into different syllable
patterns. And these patterns are used in both formal and colloquial dialects of
Arabic without too much of variation in between them. The simple fact is that
there are a lot of broken plural patterns in Arabic, too many, in fact for
me to demonstrate on this board. And that makes it especially important for us to
use our ‘phonographic memory,’ the same kind of rhythmic sense that you use when
you listen to music, for example, to hear the rhythm of the different plurals. And
as your vocabulary expands, you'll start to develop a sense for which singular
nouns are likely to fit into which plural patterns, but in order to hasten
the development of that sense, it's really important for the moment that you
you try as hard as you can to always learn the plural form of any nouns that
you encounter. So let's take a look and a listen
at a couple of examples.
‘kitaab,’ if we're talking about more than one ‘kitaab,’ a group of three or
more, we would call, we would refer to them as ‘kutub.’ ‘madiina,’ now you see a
‘taa marbuuta,’ so if you didn't know any better it might be a decent guess to
think of madiina madiina madiina, ‘madiinaat,’ but in fact it has a broken plural, as
well which is ‘mudun.’ Try saying those to yourself: ‘kutub,’ ‘mudun.’ The vowels, the
internal vowels of the plural patterns are exactly the same. Some other examples
in a different pattern:
‘walad’ turns into ‘awlaad,’
‘اسم,’ ‘أسماء’,
‘شيء,’ a ‘thing,’ turns into ‘أشياء’. ‘awlaad,’ ‘asmaa,’ ‘ashyaa’—again, we have the same
rhythm, the same internal rhythm for these words. Some other examples:
speaking of ‘taa marbuuTa,’ again, we have to be careful, because we could be, we could
be thinking, oh I see a ‘taa marbuuTa,’ I’ll just add the ‘alif-taa,’ that sound feminine
plural pattern, but not always. Sometimes we have words like غرفة which turns
into غرف, or أسرة which turns into أسر, or قصة, which turns into قصص
Or, one final group just as an example,
بيت. بيت بيت بيت...
بيوت. صفّ...
صفوف...
Or بنك, as in 'bank' in English; if we want to talk about more than one bank we refer to a
group of بنوك. 'Bank' is a long word from some European language, but the plural is
Arabized. It's a broken plural. One more example of that would be فيلم, a
movie, a film; in Arabic, follows the same pattern as these words: أفلام.
It can seem a little bit outlandish, but this is how broken plurals work. And if
you devote yourself to the challenge of trying to hear those
internal rhythms, it really will help you along, and eventually you'll be able to
play a little bit, to enjoy the sound of that rhythm. Again these are just a few
patterns--there are a couple dozen in Arabic; some of them are archaic and
hardly ever seen, and some of them we see every day.
Most of these words are fairly common, there's nothing too obscure. So for now
when you're memorizing new vocabulary, make sure to listen to that plural and 48 00:06:33,940 --> 00:00:00,000 see if it fits into one of the paradigms of another plural that you already know.