SabaaH al-full! Right now we're gonna continue talking about demonstrative
pronouns in Arabic, what we call اسم الإشارة, and here we're going to be
focusing on how to use them in Egyptian and Levantine dialect forms. If you
haven't yet, I would really encourage you to go back and take a look at the video
on how اسم الإشارة works in فصحى in formal Arabic, because the principles
are very very similar. We're going to use them almost exactly the same way. We can
use them in phrases, or we can use them to construct whole sentences. There's a
lot of minor variation in pronunciation of these pronouns from dialect to
dialect, certainly from country to country, definitely from city to city,
sometimes literally from neighborhood to neighborhood in the Arab world, so
remember as you're seeing these forms that were demonstrating on the board
that they don't represent the totality of every single little variation that
you're going to encounter, but your ears should be able to tell you when
demonstrative pronouns are being used. In Shaami, for example, two forms that you
might encounter for the masculine, instead of هذا in فصحى,
we might hear هادا instead or just هاد, right? So there's variation, but we can
hear the connection between هادا and هذا, right, it's very clear. For
هذه, in فصحى, we might instead hear هادي or sometimes هاي and for a
هؤلاء, which again we only use for human and plurals, right, we might hear
something like
هدول. And we can use them in exactly the same way we use them in فصحى, so if
we want to say 'this is an old house,' we could say هادا البيت قديم.
Or ''adiim,' right? This house, we have our مبتدأ... ''adiim,' 'it is old.'
Now again, just as in فصحى, if we added an 'alif-laam' to the adjective, we
would have هادا البيت القديم... and we have a phrase, right? 'This old house,' but
we're waiting for our خبر, the information of the sentence. So we might
say for example هادا البيت القديم كبير, it's big. One variation that you
do hear in Levantine sometimes is that اسم الإشارة kind of gets elided.
And all we hear of it is ها.
هالبيت الكبير, right, we could say
هادا البيت الكبير
'this old house,' or هالبيت الكبير, if we're talking fast and we
elide it. And once again we don't really have orthographic conventions for
writing dialect--this is one way that it's commonly expressed, but there's no
rulebook for how to write in dialect correctly, it's sort of an emerging
consensus, you might say. In Egyptian the forms are also a little bit different:
instead of هذا, we typically hear دا, which again is also sometimes written
differently: ده like that, for a feminine noun, you're going to hear دي
and for a plural, again a human plural, you'll hear دول.
Now if the demonstrative pronoun is a subject, the مبتدأ, it comes at the
beginning, just as we've already seen, right? 'This is a girl.' For example, we
could say دي بنت. But Egyptian Arabic also has a little idiosyncrasy; if we're
forming phrases with this demonstrative pronoun, if we want to say 'this girl,' for
example, then the demonstrative pronoun is usually at the end of the phrase. So
if we want to say 'this girl,' you might think we would say,
excuse me, دي البنت, but instead we say
البنت دي. Now we have a phrase, so if we want to make a sentence, for
example 'this girl is a student,' we could say البنت دي طالبة.
Full stop. Or if we wanted to say 'these students,' we wouldn't say دول الطلاب,
that would mean 'those are the students,' right, we would have to say
الطلاب دول. Let's say 'those students,' or 'these students are
Egyptian.'
الطلاب دول مصريبن. So we have that slight flip in Egyptian, when we're using اسم الإشارة 54 00:05:40,590 --> 00:00:00,000 as a مبتدأ phrase with a real noun in it.