Ahlan wa sahlan! Right now we're going to talk about sound masculine plurals, and I
say 'sound' in the sense of regular or correct. Arabic also has a great number
of irregular plural forms, which we're going to be learning about later, but
right now we're going to talk about as it's called in Arabic جمع المذكّر.
Sound masculine plurals. This is a plural pattern that we can use very
often for groups of humans--either mixed groups of men and women, or groups of
entirely men. We'll be discussing sound feminine plurals in another video.
What we do is we take a noun, for example, like عراقي, which you might
recognize as a 'nisba,' but can also mean 'an Iraqi male,' a male Iraqi person, and we
can add one of two patterns: 'waaw-nuun,' or 'yaa-nuun. So عراقيون is what we
derive,
or
قراقيين. And as a matter of fact in very formal contexts, there is also a 'fatha'
on top of that 'nuun.' The difference between the two has to do with case
endings. عراقيون, 'waaw-nuun,' tends to be the default form unless
there are other factors in the sentence that turn it into another case. This
is something that we're going to learn more about the details of later on. But
for now, default form in فصحى, in formal contexts, عراقيون. Another example,
موظّف, an employee,' our default plural' موظّفون or depending on case, possibly
موظّفين or in a hyper formal context, موظّفونَ, موظّفينَ
Now, the sound masculine plural is a construct that we find in both formal
and colloquial Arabic, but in colloquial Arabic 'waaw-nuun' does not tend to be the
default. In fact, we hardly ever see it unless someone is making a point of
being formal, and trying to speak فصحى in a socio-linguistically appropriate
context. So in Syrian Levantine dialect, for example, if we take سوري, a Syrian,
and we want to talk about a group of Syrians, we would say سوريين, and we're
definitely not going to hear that vestigial vowel at the end, that 'fatha.'
سوري واحد, one سوري,
سوري سوري سوري: سوريين، a group of Syrians
Similarly if we wanted to talk about an Egyptian, in Egyptian dialect, مصري,
one Egyptian, مصريين
As I mentioned, and this will become increasingly important, this pattern
doesn't work for every noun and we're ever going to encounter, but it works
almost all the time for 'nisba' adjectives, like عراقي سوري مصري,
and it works for nouns referring to people, or adjectives referring to
people, that have 'mu-' or 'ma-' as a beginning letter. For example, so if we wanted to talk
about someone being busy, مشغول,
we could say مشغولون or مشغولين.