Ahlan wa sahlan! Right now
I want to talk about a single word in Arabic, ما. If you're watching this you probably
know and love ما as a word. You've probably seen it as a question word we use for nonverbal sentences. Possibly the first
sentence that you were asked to
utter, or the first question that you learned how to ask in formal Arabic was ما اسمك, 'What is your name?' or
you also probably remember that ما can be used to negate verbs, both in formal and colloquial Arabic with slightly different rules.
But ما also has a lot of other functions
in formal Arabic, and those are what I want to focus on right now, because as advanced learners there comes a time
where we have to start differentiating between them.
I know that I as a learner of Arabic have had the experience of reading a text and encountering
ما in a place where it didn't expect to encounter it, and
figuring out: 'okay, it wasn't a question word, and
it
wasn't negating a verb,' and it was doing something but I was going to cross my fingers and
move on and hope that it wouldn't impact my comprehension too badly.
And that's a skill that's worth acquiring, knowing when to move on, skip over something that's opaque to you.
But as advanced learners,
we need to start to differentiate between them.
So in formal Arabic one of
the other main functions of ما is as a link between a preposition and
whatever idea is following it in the sentence. You know a couple of these words already,
it's likely. One example is
عندما
which means 'when' in the narrative, not the interrogative sense. 'When I was young,
when I used to live in
the old city...' something like that. And it's a combination of عند and
ما that enables us to follow
this idea of عند 'at a certain point,' with a verb. So if I wish to say something like
'when I arrive at the house...'
I can say
عندما أصل إلى البيت...
And
the ما
whether or not we knew it, is helping us, is giving us the ability to use a present-tense verb (in this case
conjugated for أنا أصل, 'I arrived').
If we wished, we could also compose the same sentence using a مصدر
but then you would have to get rid of the ما. Or to think of it differently, if we want to
drop the ما then we have to use a مصدر instead. So I
could say instead:
عند وصولي إلى البيت
Which we might gloss as 'upon my arrival at the house...'
It sounds a bit more formal.
But the ما is what enables us to use a verb.
We have a couple of synonyms, actually, for عندما that both mean that narrative 'when.'
In colloquial Levantine or Egyptian Arabic
You might have heard لمّا
again, we have a ما, or in very formal Arabic, you might also encounter
حَينما
حين is a word meaning
'a time, or 'a moment.' So 'at the time that...'
And we could swap in either of these synonyms for I عندما here. But they'll function in the same way.
One other important use of ما that we see is if we want to put an adverb
at the beginning of
a verbal sentence,
we use ما as, again, just a connector between these two ideas. ما sneaks in a lot
under that
umbrella, with that responsibility. So if
we wanted to say 'I often go to the cafe,'
and if I wanted to put that 'often' idea at the beginning of the sentence, if I wanted to front that idea, I could
say
كثيراً ما أذهب إلى المقهى
Or if I wanted to say 'I rarely go to the restaurant,' I
ould say
نادراً ما أذهب إلى المطعم.
So in order for this to work, we need ما
before that verb that we're using to begin the rest of our sentence. This can be a bit tricky, because sometimes
especially if you're used to using colloquial structures, you might see the ما and
the conjugated verbو and think hmm, maybe that ما is doing negation work, because we encounter that all the time in spoken Arabic.
But that's not what it's doing here.
It's just serving as kind of a bridge between the idea of 'a whole lot,' or 'rarely,' or we could say
قليلاً ما 'not that often'
There are other adverbs we could use, but it's serving as a bridge between these two ideas.
One way of bearing that in mind is remembering that while we can use ما to negate all kinds of verbs in
some colloquial Arabics, we only really use it for past tense verbs
in formal written Arabic.
So if we see a structure like this
with an adverb at the beginning, and a present tense verb and a ما sandwiched in between them,
then probably the ما is just serving as a helping particle for
that adverb.
We also get a couple of
structures with ما that can give a conditional meaning to whatever we're saying. And we can use, we can construct a question word
with a ما the end of it
to give a more conditional idea.
I should mention that
In some examples like with عندما حينما لمّا
لمّا attaches right to the end of the word, whereas with these adverbs here the ما is typically going to be
separate, it's going to be a separate word. But if we're making a conditional construction, if we want say something like 'wherever' or 'however' or
something along those lines, we can take the question word,
like أينَ 'where,' and attach a ما right to the end of it and get a word meaning
'wherever.'
Or if we wanted to say, 'however,' 'however you want to do it,'
you could take كيف and then just attach a ما to the end of it.
We also have a couple of
conditional 'wherever, however' type instructions that don't come very directly out of question words. For example
if we wanted to say 'whatever,'
We wouldn't say 'maa-maa,' that would be a little bit strange, but we can say
مهما
Or if you want to say 'whenever,' in the sense of
'each and every time that something happens,' we actually use
كلّ
and
attach a ما to it.
Not in the sense of 'whenever you want,' but in the sense of
'every time I go and do something.' 'Whenever I go to the restaurant, I see him there.' Something like that.
With these
conditional constructions, we tend to use a past tense verb after, even if the meaning is present-tense. Just like
the conditional
إذا 'if'
that you probably know.
If we wanted to say 'if you
want to go,' I would have to conjugate the wanting in the past tense: إذا أردتَ or إذا أردتِ
not 'idhaa tureed,' or 'idhaa tureedeen.' The same thing with these conditional constructions.
In fact, إذا sometimes in very formal speech also it gets a
ما
after it. Again, it's not a ما of negation. It's just the ما that serves as a bridge between this conditional idea and whatever
follows it.
So there are just a couple of functions of ما that we encounter in formal Arabic.
There are a few more, but if you
get a basic grasp of what's going on just in these couple of specific situations,
it will be very useful to you as you encounter and engage with increasingly more sophisticated
texts.