Mar7aba!
Right now I want to talk about one way to express
exclamation in Arabic using the particle
ما
In fact, we call it, in this structure, ما التعجّبية, sort of 'the "maa"
of exclamation.'
We can take a ما and then
modify a version of whatever adjective or quality the thing we're describing has,
to turn a sentence from something a little bit pedestrian:
"the cake is delicious," to something that expresses a little more
enthusiasm and emotional energy. "How very delicious this cake is!"
Suppose...
My favorite example sentence...
we had a very strange professor. We could just say الأستاذ غريب
"The professor is strange."
But if we really want to emphasize how very strange that أستاذ is,
we can take our adjectives that put it into a modified pattern.
Here we have غريب and we're going to put it into the pattern, the وزن
أفعَل
After a ما, so
We go from الأستاذ غريب, take غريب, find its جذر, 'ghayn-raa-baa'
and turn it into this:
ما أغرب الأستاذ!
"How strange that professor is!"
Sometimes I think of this construction as the Little Red Riding Hood construction. If you know the story of Little Red Riding Hood,
there's a point where she's looking at a wolf, and she's saying,
"My, how big your ears are! My, how
sharp your teeth are!" and that's exactly what we're expressing when we use construction. "How strange
the أستاذ is!"
That's it. It's a pretty simple structure, really.
There are a couple of things you might wish to know.
First, know that that أفعَل form
isn't going to change ever based on the gender or number of what we're describing.
It's going to stay exactly like that, which keeps our lives simple.
Also notice that it is
correct style in Arabic to put an exclamation point, which we call علامة التعجّب
at the end of the sentence. You might even argue that it's wrong to leave that exclamation point out.
In English, of course, you might have been told that exclamation
points can be poor style. But in Arabic is a very correct to use an explanation point there. Third, although
this pattern, أفعل،أغرب
looks very similar to the أفعَل التفضيل that
superlative construction that you probably know,
it is in fact a verb.
A form IV verb, so we might think of it, in an attempt to kind of
square the circle, as
being sort of a rhetorical question: "who or what
made the أستاذ so very strange?" ما أغرب الأستاذ؟ "What is the source of the strangeness?"
Or what 'stranged,' what 'strangeified'
the professor?
Functionally,
that's exactly how it's going to look, it's going to look very similar to the superlative construction.
And if that helps you conceptualize it, there's no harm in
maintaining those associations, but know that it is a little bit different. Finally, because this is a verb,
its object is going to be منصوب.
In this case with a 'fatha.'
So if we are
reading a fully vocalized text aloud or if you're preparing something to be spoken aloud in a very formal
context, that will be important to remember.
Let's take some other examples. البناية جميلة 'The building is beautiful.' Fine.
But if we're standing in front of a beautiful building, we might say instead
ما and then take أفعَل, find the جذر of جميل
and say
ما أجملَ البناية with our exclamation point at the end.
Another example, البقلاوة لذيذة
This one is a bit trickier, because we need to remember how doubled root letters work, but
the principle is absolutely the same.
You can say
ما ألذَّ البقلاوة
With a 'shadda' so that the two 'dhaals' can cohabitate together. Finally if we want to say, "Ali
is so very very nice," we could say علي لطيف
Or we could say
ما ألطفَ...
And here again remember all of these are منصوب
with a 'fatha,' and Ali, because we don't have an alif-laam, is actually going to take تنوين, like this:
ما ألطفَ علياً
Because we need that منصوب ending
in formal Arabic. And this would actually be a case where we would need to represent it visually, even in an unvocalized text,
because of that 'alif.'
So now you know how to exclaim about things in Arabic!