Marhaban! Right now, we're going to talk about superlatives in Arabic, or what we
call أفعل التفضيل. And if you listen to this pattern, you'll perhaps
recognize that kind of rhythmic stress, that vowel pattern. You may have
encountered a couple of words with superlative meanings already in Arabic,
perhaps أحسن, meaning 'best,' or أكبر,
meaning 'biggest.' So if you say those words to yourself, أحسن أكبر أفعل,
you'll hear that they share a certain commonality of vowels, right? We have two
syllables with 'fatha' and we have that 'alif' at the beginning. And we can use
that أفعل pattern to turn a lot of simple adjectives into superlatives,
right? We could take an adjective like جميل, 'pretty or beautiful,' and we could
turn it into أجمل.
We have to identify that three-letter root, 'jiim-miim-laam,' and
then we pop those letters out and we apply that new vowel pattern onto them.
So for example, if we wanted to say 'I'm the youngest boy in the family,' right, we
would take 'young,' the word for young which in Arabic is صغير, identify that
three-letter root, and we know that we have that 'yaa' in a lot of words, right,
طويل جميل صغير, so that 'yaa' isn't part of the root. So we could take
these three letters, and turn them into a superlative. I could say
أنا أصغر ولد في العائلة.
Or if we wanted to say that 'winter is the coldest
season of the year,' we could take that adjective for cold, بارد, identify the root,
again, if there's a long vowel, chances are, all other things being equal, it's
not part of the root, so we have 'baa, raa, daa,' that we can apply it to that أفعل
pattern, and get أبرد. So we could say
الشتاء أبرد فصل في السنة.
'Winter is the coldest season of the year.'
Notice that this أفعل pattern, when we're describing a noun,
always comes before the noun. It's kind of an exception to the rule that
adjectives always follow nouns, right? And also notice that the nouns we're
describing, the ولد, this فصل, are definite in meaning, but we do not make
them definite with 'alif-laam,' right? When we use this superlative أفعل pattern,
it's implied that that noun is definite. 'The very coldest season.' 'The very
youngest kid,' ولد. So even though it's functionally definite, we're not
going to make things definite with 'alif-laam.' That's a very strict
rule. One other little exception that you should be aware of: أحسن, that word
meaning 'best,' doesn't exactly correspond to the most common words that we hear
for 'good,' even in فصحى, but also in dialects, right? If you, if you're learning
Shaami, you might have been taught to say منيح, if you're learning Egyptian you
might have been taught to say كويّس, or even in فصحى, we usually hear a word
like جيّد, for example to talk about something being 'good.' But we're not going
to apply this pattern to any of those words, we're going to use أحسن, it's very
fixed, to mean 'best.' And it does in fact come from a فصحى word, حسن, meaning
'well,' or 'good,' that this pattern is applied to, so it's a little exception to 44 00:04:51,080 --> 00:00:00,000 to the rules. But: أحسن, 'best.