Masaa' al-kheir!
Right now, we're going to talk about
passive verbs in Arabic--verbs that we take and put into the passive voice. And in Arabic, that construction is called
الفعل المبني للمجهول, or sometimes just المبني للمجهول
Now, in English, if you had a normal North American high school English experience,
You may have been taught that the passive voice is something to be avoided. It's not considered good style.
In Arabic, the same
prohibition doesn't really exist, and we see the passive voice all the time, especially in journalistic and
expository texts, so it is something that we need to know how to use. Here is a chart,
with all of the passive forms in the past tense الماضي, and the present tense, المضارع.
You'll notice--I've
vowelled them in blue--that the vowels are pretty much the only thing that changes, which means that in an unvocalized
text, in one where we don't have all of the diacritical marks,
we'll need to think very carefully about what the subject of a verb could
be. Is the subject doing something, or is the subject having something done to it in the passive voice?
In terms of the mechanics of how the passive voice works,
you'll notice that in the past tense and the present tense all of
these verbs, which are conjugated for هو, the masculine singular, start with a 'Damma,' not, as
you might expect, a
'fatha,'
which is true in most of the passive voice conjugations. In the past tense we have first a 'Damma'
and then a 'kasra' on
the second to last
letter of the جذر, the three-letter root of the word. So for example, if we wanted to take
درس, 'he studied,' and put it into the passive,
'he or it was studied,'
we would instead of saying دَرَسَ, fatha-fatha-fatha, say دُرِسَ.
In the present tense,
the 'Damma' that's attached to the conjugation Prefix is followed with
'fathas' on all of the other
syllables, until we might get to one of the suffix endings to conjugate for a particular person. All of the
Conjugation prefixes and suffixes remain the same. So for example I could say
'The book was studied,'
دُرِسَ الكتاب
or we could say 'the article was studied' instead. Article is
مقالة
which is feminine, so I'm going to take the same vowels that I use for the passive tense,
but conjugate it
In the feminine, so I get
دُرِسَتْ المقالة.
If it helps you can think of the chorus to the horrible old song: 'ooh, eeh, ooh aah aah.'
In the past, our vowels are always 'ooh eeh' first, and then in
the present tense the first vowels that we're going to hear are 'ooh' and 'aah.'
If it doesn't help. don't go listen to that song.
Just don't.
In the couple of cases where the structure of the وزن, the verb pattern, gives us extra syllables, in
the past tense we slip an extra 'Damma'
in there. So in Form X, for example, where we have a lot of extra letters, it becomes
اُسْتُفعِلَ
where we have two 'Dammas' instead of
استَفعَلَ, in the passive voice. If we want to say
'the computer was used,'
we would vowel it اُستُخدِمَ الكمبيوتر
With a 'sukuun' in the same places as in the passive voice. Note again that without these vowels,
we would not be able to tell
necessarily
whether the verb was
passive or active. If I saw this, and I read it, I could think either 'hmm,'
this is conjugated for هو, so is there a subject that I don't know about?
Who is this person who used the computer? He used a computer, active voice or maybe,
hmm, the computer was used. اُستُخدِمَ الكمبيوتر It's up to me
to know from the context of the rest of a text whether I'm using the active or passive voice.
You'll notice that for a lot of verbs in the passive voice, we only really have to worry about inanimate subjects being
'used,' having the passive voice applied to them. Computers, books, articles.
There are a few verbs that we can use in the passive voice for people, one of which you probably know already:
the verb for
'being born.'
Most
students of Arabic learn the passive voice before they learn the active voice. وُلِدَ means 'to be born.' I could say
وُلِدْتُ في ويسكونسن
'I was born in Wisconsin,' but in the active voice, the same verb, وَلَدَ,
means 'to give birth.' So it's important not to mix these up, right? If I say
وَلَدتْ في ويسكونسن, that means that 'I gave birth in
Wisconsin,' which is a very different kettle of fish is it not?
A couple of other things to remember, or to notice: in Form VII and Form IX,
we don't really have a passive conjugation, and there are good reasons for that. Number one,
Form VII already has the meaning of taking an active verb and
making it
passive. another way of saying دُرِسَ الكتاب would be
to say instead
اندَرَسَ الكتاب
And those extra letters that make it a Form VII verb give it a passive meaning. 'the book was studied.'
so if we took اندَرَسَ and put it into
this pattern with a 'Damma' at the beginning, and a 'kasra' before the final letter of the جذر, it would almost have a
doubly passive meaning that would be too much. It would be
passive to the point of meaninglessness,
basically. And
Form IX verbs, if you go and study the Form IX video or if you've used them or seen them or heard about them,
tend to have the meaning of 'being or becoming something,'
especially being or becoming, gaining a physical quality.
'Turning green,' or
'being blonde,' so if we made
that verb passive it would become a little too recursive, it wouldn't really
have a meaning that made any sense.
Let's look at a couple more examples. In the present tense,
there's a verb in form VIII that you hear,
kind of like وُلِدَ, very very often in the
passive voice. There's a verb
اعتَبَرَ, which means 'to consider' or 'to believe to be something.' So we could say
'Naguib Mahfouz is considered
among the most
important writers of
the last century.' In a case like that,
we would do this.
That's a long sentence, I'm not going to complete it, but
vocalized
it would say, it would be pronounced,
يُعتَبَر نجيب محفوظ من أهمّ كتّاب القرن الماضي.
Notice here that we can infer from the context that
Naguib Mahfouz is
the subject of this passive verb. If we interpret it as an active verb, we would have to say okay, 'Naguib Majfouz
considers
among the most important writers...' and very quickly the logic of the sentence would kind of break
down. The
most important
thing to remember about passive verbs, again, is that we typically
aren't going to see the vowel markings in a text. Sometimes a book or an article is there using a passive
voice, they will, sometimes an editor or an author will be kind, and give you that information.
And it's really nice when they do that. It's not unheard of. It is one of those rare cases
where you might see vowel markings in a text, but as a reader,
you really really really cannot count on that being the case, so it's very important to track
the subjects in your sentences. Sometimes if a
sentence doesn't seem to make sense with an active voice, it may be that a verb is passive. That's a skill that comes with time,
but for the moment
recognize that they're out there and
keep careful track of the subject of your sentences.