Marhaba! Right now we're going to talk
about a structure called اسم الفاعل, or
what we sometimes call in english the
‘active participle,’ right, the doer of an
action. If you've studied
الجملة الفعلية
you can remember that when we diagram a
verbal sentence in Arabic, فاعل is the
subject of a sentence, right, the doer of
the verbal action in the sentence. And in
colloquial Arabic, and sometimes in
formal Arabic too,
we can actually use that وزن, right,
that pattern of vowels and
consonants, فاعل, with other verbs. We can use
it in the place of a conjugated verb,
right, we can take our root, and
substitute it in for ‘faa-‘ayn-laam’ to come
up with a meaningful active participle.
So let’s take an example. For example in formal
Arabic, we might use the verb ‘to live,’ the
conjugated verb, هو, let's say ‘he
lives,’ هو يسكن.
So if we wanted to make a whole sentence,
let's say ‘he lives in Egypt,’ right, يسكن في مصر
Now, we could probably
say that in Egyptian or Levantine
dialect as well, but we might also hear
this verb substituted out for an اسم فاعل
version of the same thing. Instead of
saying هو يسكن في مصر
with that
conjugated verb, we would figure out what
the root is, right, the جذر, that tri-
consonantal root, and in this case it's
‘siin-kaaf-nuun,’ and then we would
substitute those letters in for each of
those placeholder letters, right ‘faa-
‘ayn-laam,’ so instead of saying هو يسكن في مصر
we could also say هو ساكن في مصر
Literally, what we're
saying, is ‘he is a liver in Egypt,’ right,
he is ‘doing living’ in Egypt. Now since
this is اسم فاعل it's an اسم,
it’s a noun,
right we have a noun describing this
verbal action, or what we think of as a verbal
action, taking place. And since it's a
noun if we want to refer to someone else,
say a woman, instead of هو we might
want to talk about a هي, and in that
case we would need to make this اسم فاعل
agree in terms of gender, right, so
if we were talking about a female or a
woman, we would put that feminine marker,
‘taa marbuuTa,’ on the end so هو
ساكن في مصر
هي ساكنة في مصر
right, she is a liver in Egypt,
she's doing living in Egypt, and if we
wanted to talk about a group of people,
we would add that sound regular plural
ending that we have in dialect, هم
ساكنين في مصر right
So let's take another example, suppose
that someone is sharing information with
you that you happen already to be aware
of, and and this is tiresome to you and
you want to say okay, already, I know.
We could use a conjugated verb, we
could just say أعرف, ‘I know,’ or in
Levantine or Masri dialect, we might
choose to say, I suppose I, as a man, I
would say alright I am ‘a knower,’ right,
‘I know,’ and to do that, again, we would
take we would isolate this root, we know
that ‘alif’ is part of the conjugated verb,
so we would take our ‘ayn, raa, faa,’
and pop them into the places of ‘faa-‘ayn-laam’
here, right and we would retain that
vowel structure that exoskeleton
that we have and I could just say أنا عارف,
I know, I am a knower of what
you are telling me, so please do not
waste my time, right? Or if you were a
woman and you wanted to say that
أنا عارفة
Or maybe as a class, your instructor is
telling you something that you've
already reviewed last week, and you feel
you have a grip on it so you could all
say نحن عارفين
They're pretty equivalent in meaning.
Sometimes اسم فاعل used this way in
colloquial is a little bit closer to the
kind of present continuous that we can
use in English, right, ‘I am going, I am
seeing I am living,’ as opposed to the
simple present, ‘I go, I see, I live.’ These
are very much shades of grey, right, in
Arabic, we're not concerned with those
exact equivalencies so much, and they don't
really, those those precise shades of
tents are not really something we can
express as easily in formal Arabic, and
we don't really need to. But sometimes,
sometimes اسم فاعل used this way in
the place of a verb conveys more of that
present continuous ‘-ing’ gerund form, right?
A couple of points before we finish up:
first of all اسم فاعل is definitely not
uniquely a colloquial structure, in fact
a lot of words that are used all the
time in فصحى, formal Arabic, and dialects
come from this form, are اسم فاعل
For example, a few, one that
you might already know is طالب, right,
and again we need to listen for that
rhythmic stress, the music of the word: طالب,
which comes from the root ‘Taa-laam-baa,’
which has to do with… طالب means
student, and ‘Taa-laam-baa, that root has
to do with ‘requesting or demanding,’ right,
you’re
you're seeking information from someone.
Or you might know the verb يكتب, to
write, ‘he writes,’ يكتب, and from the
same root ‘kaaf,
taa, baa,’ we get the اسم فاعل كاتب, which
is the word that we see most often for a
‘writer,’ right someone who writes novels
or magazine articles. كاتب.
Another point is that in all these
examples, we have used form I verbs,
right, the simplest form.
There are derived forms as well: if you
go look at the videos on مصدر, you'll
see some of those forms written out in
charts, and each of those derived forms
has its own slightly different, but
fairly intuitive form of اسم فاعل. That's
not something you need to worry about
controlling so much right now, but be
aware as you learn more verbs and gain
more control over them that any verb,
really, can be put into this
structure depending on the context and
depending on the sentence, it is a
possibility.