Ahlan!
Right now, we're going to talk about a special group of words in Arabic called
'Inna and its Sisters,' 'إنّ وأخواتها' in Arabic.
You may have already studied another group of words, 'Kaana and its Sisters,' which function in a similar but not identical
way, in terms of how they dictate sentence structure and appropriate case endings in formal Arabic.
Here are six of the Sisters of إنّ that you might encounter.
إنّ Itself is a particle that's kind of difficult to translate in English, and in fact often
we don't, but it's Usually added at the beginning of a
sentence to draw the reader's attention to the importance of it. Sometimes if you read, for example an old
translation pf an Arabic text, they will translate إنّ as
'verily,' or 'forsooth,' or something like that. But
often
these days, إنّ Is not necessarily even translated as
a word into English from Arabic. It just doesn't have a
function in
English the way it does in Arabic.
كأنَّ
eans 'as though,' or 'as if,' when, we're sort of
saying that things seem to be a certain way.
لأنّ ,is a word that you probably know 'because.' You've already been using it and now
we're going to learn a little more about its grammar and the ways that it affects formal sentences.
لكنّ is a variant of
لكن or, ولكن which you already know, and its meaning is entirely
synonymous. It just means 'but.'
لعلّ can be used to express 'perhaps,'
possibility, or maybe a hope or a fear about something, you know
'perhaps he's in his house,' 'perhaps I'll get to travel to Beirut this summer,' and
لَيتَ
conveys a meaning of
wishing for the impossible.
Kind of like 'if only' in English. 'If only you
were here,' 'if only the أستاذ hadn't made the test so long and hard.' Things of that nature.
So all of these particles must be followed in Formal Arabic by a جملة اسمية,
a nominal sentence. Remember
that a
جملة اسمية
is formed of two parts in its most basic form.
المبتدأ والخبر.
The subject and the predicate. So here is a جملة اسمية
but when we have an إنّ sentence, or a sentence with another sister of إنّ, the terminology changes a little bit.
Let's just start with a جملة اسمية so that we can see
the comparison. If we said, my favorite example sentence,
الأستاذ غريب.
'The professor is strange.' That's a جملة اسمية, and the مبتدأ
comes first, and then the خبر, and
both the مبتدأ and the خبر are in the مرفوع case.
So
we would Have a 'Damma' over the definite مبتدأ, and then
'Damma tanwiin' over the indefinite خبر.
الأستاذُ غريبٌ is how we would pronounce it, fully vocalized,
in formal Arabic.
Now, suppose that we wanted some real Arabic style here, and we wanted to say
'Yea, verily I say unto you, the professor is strange,' we could begin
that sentence with
إنّ. But then in terms of the terminology the nomenclature, we would change things a little bit.
We still Have the same words, it can still work,
but instead of referring to the subject here as مبتدأ, we would refer to it as
اسم إنّ.
If we were using another one of these particles, we would say it اسم كأنّ, اسم لكنّ, or whatever the case may be and then
this would be
خبر إنّ.
You might recognize this, again, as very similar to the terminology that
we use to talk about a nominal sentence that comes after كان and one of its sisters, except that it's
اسم إنّ and خبر إنّ
instead of
اسم كان and خبر كان.
The other little difference Is
that
After إنّ or one of it's sisters, the اسم is always منصوب,
not مرفوع ,and
then the خبر is
مرفوع.
So in this case, اسم إنّ would need to be منصوب with a 'fatha,' and
then خبر إنّ would still be
مرفوع. Again, we're not likely to see these markings in a normal text, a newspaper article,
a novel, anything like that. But
when we are reading formal Arabic aloud, when we're speaking
formal Arabic, it's important to know that
these structures change just a little bit. you might also recognize
this as the opposite of what happens in
'kaana' and it's sisters. In that case, we would have the اسم
be
مرفوع, and the خبر be منصوب but here, it's simply reversed.
So let's look at a couple more examples. If we wanted to say
'he likes California because the weather is beautiful.'
يحبّ كالفورنيا...
If I were reading it quickly
without case endings, I would say, okay,
يحبّ كالفورنيا لأنّ الطقس جميل.
But here, we want the إعراب. Okay, we have
what would be a جملة اسمية, and
now here, if I wanted to just mark it up and determine which words were serving which functions, I would say that this is
اسم لأنّ,
the subject of the sentence that comes after لأنّ, and then here is
خبر لأنّ
And again, اسم لأنّ is always going to be منصوب,
so I'm going to add a 'fatha' here, and then خبر لأنّ is
مرفوع, once again.
Oops, lost my chalk. If we wanted to Say
'perhaps the employees are around, we could express it this way:
لعلّ...
Now here, we need to think about the regular plural ending, and the way it's going to change in منصوب. If it were مرفوع,
we would say
موظّفون but because اسم لعلّ needs to be منصوب, we would need to change that to
موظّفين, so, we could say
لعلّ الموظّفين...
One way to say 'here' or 'present' or 'around' is موجود, so in the plural, I
would add my regular plural, but
موجود would need to be مرفوع because it is a خبر of لعلّ so
لعلّ الموظّفين موجودون.
With my nice مرفوع ending there.
And again,
here would be my اسم and
here would be my خبر.
اسم لعلّ and خبر لعلّ.
One wrinkle that you should be aware of is that in
all of these cases, after any of these particles, sometimes
we want to begin a nominal sentence with a pronoun and not a regular noun, so perhaps, we already know that we're talking about الموظّفين
in this case, and we wanted to just say 'maybe they're around, perhaps they're around. In that case,
we would attach a
pronoun suffix to لعلّ that works just like the pronoun suffixes that you know, the possessive
suffixes, and we could say
لعلّهم موجودون.
And with the pronoun suffixes, we don't need to worry about
marking case. We know that theoretically,
because the هم functions as the اسم of لعلّ, it is
منصوب, but we aren't going to change the vowels in any way to
make that manifest. It's just understood.
One last thing. Sometimes for reasons of style,
someone might want to use a verb directly after إنّ or
one of its sisters, in which case you can insert kind of a dummy pronoun, a placeholder pronoun,
attached to
إنّ or one of its sisters, and that pronoun is always going to be
ه, the masculine singular third-person variant. So if we wanted to Say
'They said that the windows were smashed,'
we could express it this way:
قالوا إنّه كُسرَت الشبابيك.
Now here, we have a passive verb, and
شبابيك is the subject of that passive verb, so this هو doesn't refer to a specific
grammatically masculine
individual or object that smashed the windows. We just know that the windows
were smashed, and we haven't attributed an actor to that action. So
more than anything else, you should be prepared to encounter that in
reading, if you're reading a text in Arabic, and you see a ه there, it could refer to a هو
that is the subject of a new sentence, or it could just be kind of a placeholder pronoun that lets the writer
get straight to the verb that they consider the important part of the sentence. And
that is إنّ and its sisters!