Marhaba! Right now, we're going to talk about relative pronouns in Arabic
or what we call in Arabic
الاسم الموصول
sort of 'the arrived
name' or ;the arrived noun' is literally What we're saying. In English, we have several different relative pronouns,
including 'who,' 'that, 'which,' which we use in sentences like 'I still have the books that i read in my childhood,'
'Do you know the people who live in the yellow house?' 'Do you remember the woman whom we met at the party?' All of these
would be the relative pronouns; the pronouns that refer specifically back to a
noun earlier in the sentence. What we would call the antecedent if we were being fancy about it.
So 'the books that...'
'the people who...' 'the woman whom...' There's always a noun floating back there earlier,
that this pronoun,
this relative pronoun is referring to.
First,
before we get into the woods with this big chart, a reminder about What الاسم الموصول is not.
When we are introducing an
indefinite noun in Arabic, and then we have another clause that comes after it, we don't need any
kind of relative pronoun at all. We have a separate video on this structure, which is called
جملة الصفة.
So if i wanted to say 'I have a dog who likes to eat homework,'
I don't use anything at all, it's just implied.
عندي كلب يحبّ أن يأكل الواجب.
'I have a dog who,' or 'that,' depending on the level
to which we humanize the dog, i guess. That's where the relative pronoun would go in Arabic, but because we are talking about an
indefinite dog, we're introducing 'a dog,' we don't have 'alif-laam' here,
we don't need any kind of relative pronoun at all. So if you need a refresher, go ahead
and look at that video, جملة الصفة.
Because we don't need any word at all. What we're talking about today is sentences that
have definite nouns
followed by relative pronouns. 'The books,' 'the people,' 'the woman,' etc. etc. In that case,
we do need a
relative pronoun in the Arabic sentence. And that relative pronoun
is sort of going to be a variation on the theme, depending on whether it's masculine or feminine,
dual or
plural. We have a separate video about the vagaries of the dual. You can check that out or you can wait until
you learn a little more in class about the dual.
The wrinkle that occurs in Arabic, is that after this relative pronoun, we also need a
complete جملة فعلية, a verbal sentence that comes after it, and we need to refer to
that noun in the second clause of the sentence. Let me show you
what I mean. Let's take this:
'I still have the books that I read in my childhood.' First, I need to figure out which relative pronoun
I'm going to need to use.
لا أزال عندي الكتب...
Okay.
'Books,'
كتب, non-human plural, which means I'm going to use feminine singular, as I always do when I'm talking about non-human plurals.
So, feminine singular: الّتي.
الكتب الّتي...
'The books that I read in my childhood.' Now, as
fluent speakers of English, it's tempting to say التي قرأتُ, 'I read...'
في طفولتي.
But, I
need to refer to الكتب
somewhere in
this second sentence. You'll notice that It isn't really a complete
idea. 'I read in my childhood...' What did i read? I need to
refer somehow to الكتب. So literally, in Arabic, the workaround would be
الكتب التي قرأتُها.
'The books that I read them in
my childhood.' In English, that would be sort of strange, and sort of wrong. It would be
perhaps a bit run-on. It would look as though we had two sentence-length ideas, and we were trying,
failing to shoehorn them into one sentence.
But after the relative pronoun التي, referring to الكتب, in the second--
in the relative clause that follows the relative pronoun, i need to refer to
that noun again. I need to refer to those كتب again.
So let's look at another example. 'Do you know the people who
live in the yellow house?'
هل تعرف الناس...
Okay 'the people who live in the yellow house.' 'People.' Now I'm dealing with a human plural, and I don't know whether or not
they are of particular genders, so I'm going to default to the masculine, which Is also the mixed gender. And I get
اللذين
Okay.
هل تعرف الناس اللذين يسكنون...
Okay 'the people who live in
the yellow house.'
I need to conjugate the verb for الناس, it needs to be that third-person
plural
conjugation.
اللذين يسكنون في البيت الأصفر.
Now,
we don't have an object pronoun here, but I have successfully referred to those people again, because this verb is conjugated
for them.
So the reference to الناس
is contained within يسكنون. Think of it as an imaginary هم, right?
'Who...' I'm referring to those people, 'the people who
they live in
the yellow house.'
It's in there. There's a reference to
the noun that
the relative pronoun is referring to. So I'm good.
One final example.
'Do you remember the woman whom we met at the party?' Okay, let's get real, in spoken English we would probably say
'who,' or
we could probably just remove the pronoun altogether. 'Do you remember the woman we met at the party?'
But in Arabic, we still need that relative pronoun.
So:
'Do you remember
the woman...'
هل تتذكّر المرأة...
Which pronoun do I need? Well, it's feminine singular, so I can go ahead and use the feminine singular
pronoun again. and Mark off
المرأة التي...
Hmm...
'...that we met at
the party. Here it's a little tricky. We need to remember that the verb for 'meeting'
has a
preposition after it, not a direct object.
التي ,we met
تعرّفنا...
And then we have, after تعرّف we have the preposition
على
but we also need to refer back to that woman.
So what we do is we take that preposition, على, and then we add
the ها, so she is present in that second
جملة فعلية. That second sentence. So we're literally saying 'the woman that, or 'the woman whom
we met her at
the party.'
في الحفلة.
It's a little tricky, it's a little counter-intuitive for native or native-ish speakers of English, because
tossing in that second reference
to the noun we're referring to is
not something we do. But these are some simple examples that hopefully give you an idea of
how it works.
One last couple of notes. You'll notice that there's a sneaky asterisk here. If we're talking about a group of just women,
grammatically feminine human beings,
we do have a couple of variations. These are pretty rare.
اللواتي
is the relative pronoun that you're most likely to hear, but
perhaps someone wants to show off their chops, and how much they know
beautiful, refined,
formal Arabic, and they might toss one of these in. So I'm throwing them in, just for you
to look at. But in modern written usage
اللواتي tends to be what you encounter
ninety-nine percent of the time.
The other wrinkle that we need to be aware of is that when we're talking about
dual forms, we have one form for
the مرفوع noun, the
nominative case nouns, and
another form four منصوب and مجرور nouns.
accusative or
genitive nouns that come
after prepositions or in an إضافة.
If you haven't
studied case endings yet, the important thing is to recognize these forms and see when they occur and recognize that they all
mean the same thing. Just to demonstrate though, in one example, if we were talking about
two women--'oh, do you remember the two women
that we met at the party?
If we are thinking about case,
'do you remember...'
المرأة, well, I have a 'taa marbuuTa,' so I need to make this dual, and
in فصحى, in Standard Arabic, I have a choice between ان or َين,
depending on whether it's the subject, or the object, or
preceded by a preposition. Here, we're remembering
the two women, right? So they're going to be the direct object of this verb, تتذكّر, and therefore they're going to be
منصوب. This is a little bit tricky, the order of operations, but bear with me. Okay, I know that
the two women are the object of this verb, Which means they're منصوب, and
since they're both women, they're feminine so I would need to use
اللتَين as the object pronoun, but I would also use the ين ending here.
There's kind of a
harmony of vowels. المرأتَين...
It's getting a little crowded in here--اللتَين, so ين ين.
تعرّفنا على...
Oops, I forgot my ي there.
It would be عليها, in the singular, with a ي, but here we're talking about
two of them, exactly two, so we would replace it with
هما.
في الحفلة. So a very specific way to refer to 'the two women
that,'
dual feminine,
'we met them the two of them dual feminine in the party.' If you haven't tackled the dual,
activating the dual yet, don't worry about this so much. Just know to recognize it if you see it,
understand that two
things or two people are being referred to.
If you have encountered the dual, and you are working on activating it, remember that
in
فصحى, in formal Arabic, we need to be very specific about
the case, and the
gender, and we dave different Forms that we might use depending on
different cases.
A final final note is that in most colloquial spoken Arabics,
all of these different relative pronouns can
be replaced with one particle. In Egyptian and Levantine,
it's
اللي.
Sort of an elision of all these different forms. إللي, masculine, feminine, singular, plural,
dual, we're just going to say اللي. So I could say in
Levantine or Egyptian colloquial,
ما زال/لسا عندي الكتب اللي قريتها في طفولتي.
or
بتعرف الناس اللي بيسكنو/اللي ساكنين في البيت الأصفر؟
In colloquial, it's very very simple, and we don't need to worry about that order of operations in speech. But in writing,
it is expected of us as
mature,
comfortable users of Arabic to be able to perform that
kind of mental arithmetic, and figure out exactly which of these relative pronouns we need.