Sabaa7 al-kheir! Right now, I'm going to talk about a special category of verbs which we call in Arabic
كاد وأخواتها or 'Kaada and it's sisters.'
This is a category of verbs that includes several synonyms
meaning either to be about to or on the verge of to almost do something, to hope for,
or that, something happens, and also 'to start or to begin.'
Each of these categories has some synonyms and I've included them all here.
Some of them are very very formal, or rather archaic, but I'm including them all here for the sake of
thoroughness and completeness.
When we're talking about
كاد or one of its sisters in a sentence
we use the same terminology that we use with كان and it's sisters or
إنّ and it's sisters. We have separate videos on those.
When we're talking about the subject of كاد or one of its sisters, we use
اسم to refer to it, the
subject of كاد and when we're talking about the object, the predicate, the rest of the idea, we would refer to
خبر كاد
With كاد and its sisters though, the خبر is limited. With كان or إنّ,
Sometimes the خبر can be a noun,
Sometimes the خبر can be a prepositional phrase or a verb... with كاد and its sisters, the خبر
always needs to be a verb, and it always needs to be a present-tense verb, a
فعل مضارع. So let's take a look at some examples.
We have, as
I said, three categories of كاد وأخواتها
The first we call أفعال المقاربة, which we might gloss in English as 'verbs of
approaching.' All of these verbs are synonymous, and they mean 'to be almost about to do to,'
'to be on the verge of.'
Some sense like that. So here is one example: تكاد المسافرة...
I forgot my dots!...
تغادر المدينة.
تكاد المسافرة تغادر المدينة.
So مسافرة means traveler: "the traveler, the female traveler
is about to leave the city" would be one way we could translate that sentence. With افعال المقاربة
sometimes we see أن
before this
second verb,
but it's not necessary, and in fact a lot of the time we don't see it at all.
So here's another example. This is from a poem by Abu Nuwas, where he says
كاد يقتلني ذكر الحبيب
So: "the memory of my beloved, ذكر الحبيب
almost
killed me," because I was missing
that حبيب so very very much. So in these examples
المسافرة
is our اسم, the subject of تكاد, so it's conjugated for feminine, and then تغادر
Is our خبر. It needs to be a present tense verb, here's our present tense verb. Similarly, ذكر الحبيب...
Abu Nuwas is a poet, so he can play with syntax a little bit, is our اسم, and يقتلني
is our خبر.
Our second category is what we call أفعال الرجاء, which we might translate as "verbs of
hope," or "verbs of hoping."
You can think of these as meaning something along lines of
"hopefully." The first two, عسى and حرى, are what we call
جامد
meaning that they don't really conjugate for different subjects.
They tend to stay the same, kind of like "hopefully" in English. We don't change "hopefully"
depending on whether I'm the one who will hopefully be doing something, or whether someone else will hopefully be doing something else.
So here are a couple of examples:
here's an example taken from the Qur'an from سورة البقرة and
it reads in part:
عَسَىٰ أَن تَكْرَهُوا شَيْئًا وَهُوَ خَيْرٌ لَّكُمْ
Here عسى means
something more like "perhaps," so "perhaps it is possible to dislike or hate something, and
still it's good for you." God knows best.
A more secular profane example from a song:
عسى ربّي is the name of the song
عسى ربّي
يخلّيك لعيوني
Meaning sort of "hopefully," or "may God may ربّي, my lord,
leave you for my eyes." Sort of a term of endearment--"may God preserve you and keep you."
اخلَولَقَ is our third فعل رجاء and it is
wonderfully, delightfully strange. It's not a verb that you're going to see much in
contemporary usage. It's actually a form XII verb, which typically
learners of Arabic don't even
study, unless they're concerning themselves very deliberately with certain kinds of old, classical texts.
But we're including it, just in case someone tries to argue that it doesn't exist. And
اخلولق is not جامد, it does conjugate for its subject. So here we have two examples,
both of them about raining:
اخلولق المطر أن ينزل
so, "hopefully...
المطر, the rain
will fall," will descend. Or,
we could rephrase the same sentence to say اخلولقتْ السحابة أن تمطر
"Hopefully السحابة, the cloud, will
rain down."
It's a fun word.
But we're unlikely to see it, as I say, in contemporary texts, or contemporary speech, unless we're studying كاد وأخواتها.
Our final category... Oh, excuse me, before I go on.
Here
we typically have أنْ
after حرى and اخلولق
عسى can have أن or
it can skip أن,
as in this example, which is a little more colloquial, or this example, which, from the Qur'an, is very formal.
Our final category, أفعال الشروع, "verbs of starting," or "verbs of beginning," we might say,
has a lot of synonyms,
some of which we see fairly commonly, especially like بدأ and أخذ
or جعل, قام might be verbs that you already know, and many others that are a little more
off the beaten path,
we might say. But they all mean functionally about the same thing: to begin or to start
doing something. And we see these verbs a lot, especially in
narration of stories. So
if we were writing a story,
we could say something like
بدأ الولد يبكي.
"The boy began to cry."
Perhaps after he was confronted with this gigantic number of synonyms for the same thing. Notice that here,
we have بدأ, our verb, and we have الولد,
our اسم, and then يبكي, that present tense verb,
which is our خبر, but we don't have أنْ
after it.
With a lot of other verbs we use أنْ to connect
separate verbal ideas: أريدُ أن أذهب
إلا البيت... but with all of these أفعال شروع we skip the أن, we do not include it.
Similarly,
If we wanted to have a lighter note and say أخذت البنت تضحك, "the girl began to laugh,"
أخذ and بدأ are synonyms. But this one is conjugated feminine for بنت, and again, we have an اسم
And there we have our خبر
of a present tense verb, فعل مضارع, but we don't have أن here.
Again,
we have a lot of options here, and some of them you're not going to see. So
focus on remembering
especially the lack of أن in sentences like this, for beginning, and on focusing on the more commonly used
synonyms like كاد, بدأ, أخذ
Those are words that we are actually likely to hear, and that are very useful for narrating and for communicating our ideas.