Sabaa7 al-kheir! In this video I want to talk more about the إضافة and
the different ways that we can specify the definiteness of nouns
within them. We might call the relationship between الأضافة والمعرفة والنكرة in Arabic
I'm assuming here that you have a good understanding of the basic
إضافة structure. And what I want to do now is complicate things a little bit.
Suppose that we want to talk about 'a
newspaper publishing center.'
Now you might reasonably suspect that in order to convey that idea in Arabic
we would need to use kind of إضافة structure and
front or reorder the words a little bit. And we can line those nouns up and say, okay, 'a center
of publishing... إصدار...
الصحف. Newspapers. مركز أصدار الصحف.
Looks good. And the truth is this is a perfectly good إضافة. But what we wanted to say was *a*
newspaper publishing center.
And what we have here is *the* newspaper publishing center. مركز أصدار الصحف, alif-laam at the end.
So the whole thing is functioning as definite, but that's not what we want to do here.
There's a big difference potentially of meaning between "a
newspaper publishing center" and "the newspaper publishing center," maybe
the definition flies that it's the only one. We don't want to do that!
So what we do in a case like this is we use the preposition
لِـ between
the noun we want to stay indefinite and the rest of the phrase. So if we say instead
مركز لِأصدار الصحف
suddenly
the مركز is indefinite on its own, and then إصدار الصحف is its own separate
إضافة, so the مركز technically isn't part of this إضافة. "A center of
or for إصدار الصحف, production of newspapers."
Another example: suppose that we wanted to talk about "a
solution for the problem of funding," or "financing."
Well, same thing we could say take our nouns,
حل مشكلة التمويل
But once again,
This looks like one connected definite إضافة, because of the 'alif-laam.'
So once more, our solution, if we want to talk about "a
solution," we would just add that
لِـ to the noun that comes after the noun we want to stay indefinite. So now we are saying "a
solution"
instead of "the solution" to the problem of financing. We
can also use لِـ to emphasize the
indefiniteness of a noun. If you think about the difference in English between two phrases like "her new friend" and
"a new friend of hers," we can use لِـ and
structure order of the words a little bit differently to get those different in meaning. So if we wanted to say "her new friend," as
you know, we could say
صديقها الجديد
But we want to emphasize "a new friend of hers," we want to give that little bit of rhetorical
distance. What we can do is we can take that ـها and then use
لِـ plus that suffix at the end to give a more indefinite flavor. We could instead say
صديق جديد لها
Not quite an إضافة,
but another important function of لِـ where it keeps things indefinite for us.
Now, before specifying or enumerating a part of a group, we can also use
the preposition من. ...I'm gonna make some room here...
...oops...
...which functions a little bit like 'of' in English, but it does interrupt our إضافة. Technically,
two nouns, two ideas connected in this way, by من won't be an إضافة. They'll just be
sort of one noun, and then a subordinate prepositional phrase. So if we wanted to
take some examples--we see من used a lot with expressions of quantity, like the word for
"part," in Arabic,
جزء من, or a quantity
قدر من... they're related but not identical words. So if we wanted to say, I don't know, "ignorance is part of the problem." We could say
الجهل جزء من المشكلة
Or, "there's a lot of information
in this book,"
or "a great quantity of information in this book," using قدر
we could say
في هذا الكتاب قدر كبير من المعلومات
"In this book, there's a lot of information." And in these situations, again, we wouldn't have
an
إضافة, technically we would just have a couple of nouns that were connected by من, because they're talking about
quantities, about being part of a sort of
intellectual set of things.
Finally, if we're constructing an إضافة or an إضافة-ish phrase using a مصدر and the verb that's
related to that مصدر
typically has a certain preposition after it, then we're going to retain that preposition, which will have the same effect of kind of
interrupting our
إضافة. I'm making it, turning it sometimes into something other than an إضافة. For example, if we wanted to talk about "an
expression of respect." Well the مصدر for that expression
is
تعبير. And you might think, okay, "expression, respect, expression of respect. I'm just going to go ahead
and put احترام here," but
تعبير, the مصدر, comes from the verb عبّرَ
يعبّر
and typically after those,verbs or after this مصدر, you have a
specific preposition, which is sort of arbitrary, but it happens to be
عن. So in a case like this, if we want to talk about "an expression of respect," we would say
تعبير عن الاحترام, we're just going to keep that preposition
because it's the preposition that's normally used after our verb. Or if we wanted to talk about,
to say something like "we will attend their wedding
celebration." Well, "wedding celebration, celebration of the wedding of them." It seems إضافة-ish,
it seems as though it might be close to an إضافة, but that
word for 'celebration' in Arabic, احتفال,
typically has a preposition after it,
and that preposition is بِـ, so we could say
سنحضر الاحتفال بزواجهما.
And in a case like this,
since it is a specific celebration, we're going to put the 'alif-laam' there, الاحتفال
and
then use the بِـ and then زواج is definite with هما, but we don't have an
إضافة here. We're saying something like "we will attend the
celebration of the wedding of them." We wouldn't have a way to express it
other than that in English, but the بِـ is pretty much obligatory after
احتفال, if we are celebrating something, if that celebration is
specific to something or other, بِـ is just the preposition we're going to use to convey that idea.
So using all of these tools that I've articulated here will really enable you to express more
specific shades of meaning. There's always a workaround in language, right? We could always rephrase ourselves and
circumnavigate a little bit to get our meaning across, but we want a very
specific shade of meaning-- "a new friend of hers," not just "her new friend," or
part of or a "quantity of," we can use these specific tools to be very precise in our articulation of what we mean.