Masaa' al-kheir!
Right now, I want to talk about
using
اسم الفاعل
in a حال clause in Arabic. Remember اسم الفاعل is
the active participle. The form, the word that we
get from a verb that describes the 'doer' of an action. A
حال clause is a way of describing how an action was undertaken.
Sometimes in English we use adverbs for this. Other times
we can get away with using the
'-ing' form of a verb,
the gerund. So if I wanted to say
'they entered the classroom
dragging their feet,'
or 'rubbing their eyes,'
that is what we're trying to express when we use a
حال clause. There are several ways of constructing a حال clause; right now
we're going to be focusing on using a
اسم الفاعل. If you'd like a refresher on how to construct اسم الفاعل
there's another video that you can go and look at, if you like some review.
So
to create a sentence like this in Arabic, we need a main verb with a subject, and
then, we need an اسم فاعل in the منصوب that refers back to
that original
subject. So if I wanted to say, for example, 'I left the city
heading for
my family's house,' in Arabic I
could say it this way:
غادرتُ المدينة, and now I have a verb in Arabic
يقصد, and one of its meanings can be 'to aim for' or 'head for' a geographical place, and I want to put this
into
اسم الفاعل, and it also needs to be in the منصوب
case. Remember that منصوب, one of its meanings is that it's kind of adverbial, so it answers the question 'how
did I leave the city?' So I would express that in Arabic
غادرتُ المدينة قاصد...
Now, I have an اسم فاعل, and now, it needs to be منصوب.
قاصداً بيت أسرتي.
So, if we wanted to render it in an overly literal, not-quite-accurate way in English,
We could say 'I left the city "headingly"
to my family's house.' That sounds very strange in English, but in Arabic
it's what we have to do if we want to express these ideas.
Let's take another example.
'My father
refused, saying that he doesn't want me to study literature.'
So
رفض والدي...
Now we know the verb for 'say,'
يقول
and this is a bit irregular. The 'waaw' would actually turn into a 'hamza.'
So our اسم فاعل would be قائِل,
And then again, we need to make it
منصوب:
قائِلاً إنّه لا يريد ...
etc., etc. 'My father refused, saying, refused "sayingly"
that he doesn't want...' et cetera.
Again, we couldn't phrase it that way in English, but in Arabic, it's almost more regular, right?
We can use the adverbial form to describe how an action was undertaken, and
in formal Arabic we have the same structure every time in a case like this.
One final example. Let's say, The student studied Arabic,
smiling.' 'Smilingly, the student studied Arabic.'
Let's make it a female student.
درسَتْ الطالبة العربية
Now I need to take the verb for 'smile' in Arabic, ابتسم,
and turn it into an اسم فاعل. I could go check out a chart,
figure out that if ابتسم is a Form VIII
verb, and then put it into the
Form VIII
اسم فاعل
pattern مُبتَسِم
I just have that memorized, and hopefully, in sha Allah, you will too someday.
But I need to remember that
my subject here, the person doing the studying while smiling, is grammatically feminine.
We're talking about a female student. So I would need to add a
'taa marbuuTa' on to it.
مبتَسِمة
And again, it needs to be منصوب. So in this case since it's feminine with a 'taa marbuuTa, I don't add
the 'alif that I would for منصوب,
and there I have my sentence.
Now,
remember, we could do this for
plural subjects as well, and in a case like that, all of our اسماء فاعل tend to take pretty regular plural endings.
Most of the time you're going to see for
a masculine or mixed gender plural, you're going to see ـون or ـين, but because
all of these اسماء فاعل are
منصوب،
I'm going to make sure that I use the منصوب ending. So if I wanted to rephrase this,
'we left the house...'
غادرنا المدينة،
then instead of قاصداً for just one person, it would be
قاصدين بيت أسرتي
or maybe بيت أسرتنا, depending on the story we're telling. Same thing here, if my
whole family
refused,
رفض أفراد أسرتي
رفض is conjugated in the singular, because it comes before
أفراد أسرتي I could switch it, and make it a
جملة اسمية, in which case
I would need to conjugate the verb for the plural subject. Either way, all of them said all of them refused,
قائلين إنّهم...
'that they...' etc., etc.
Or, if this group of female students was
studying Arabic while smiling, درسنَ, that's our sound feminine plural conjugation,
الطالبات العربيةَ
'All of the female students were studying Arabic, smiling,' then I
would add
مبتسماتٍ
Remember that the feminine plural
only has
two sets of
case endings. It's either
مرفوع with 'Damma,' or
مجرور or منصوب with 'kasra.' So 'all of the female students studied Arabic, مبتسمات, smiling.'
Again, that is one way of constructing a حال clause. There are others, but
this is a nice way to
increase the literary value of your sentences. We could probably, if we wanted, break these up into
smaller sentences. "I left my house. I headed to...' or, excuse me. 'I left the city.'
'I headed to my family's house.' But that sounds a bit
cave-mannish, right? And it's much more
stylistically elegant to create one long sentence, and use a حال clause instead.