SabaaH al-kheir! In this video we're going to
talk about how to define and describe
people, places, and things using an
adjectival sentence, what we call an
Arabic جملة الصفة. ‘Siffa’ is actually the
Arabic word for adjective, and when we
use جملة الصفة, what we're doing is
we are further describing an indefinite
noun that has already been introduced in
a sentence. Let's take a look at these
examples of English-language sentences. ‘I
have a sister whose name is Mariam,’ ‘she
is a professor who teaches at Smith
College,’ ‘I remember it from a book that I
read.’ In each of these sentences, we have
an indefinite noun, and then we have a
connecting word—whose, who, that,’ followed
by additional information that's giving
us extra context, right? In Arabic, we need
a complete second sentence, a جملة اسمية
or a جملة فعلية. In English, you'll
notice that after this break, after the
whose, the who, the that, we’re provided
additional information in a way that is
not quite a complete sentence, right? ‘I
read…’ well, it could be a complete
sentence, but we don't have an object for
our verb. ‘teaches at Smith College, we're
missing our subject, right? ‘…name is Mariam,’
we don't have that pronoun at the
beginning, telling us who or what we're
talking about. In Arabic, we need those
things. We need to insert an additional
pronoun that refers back
to that noun that's being introduced, back
to that indefinite sister, or professor,
or book. So let's take some examples. If
we wanted to translate this sentence
into Arabic, what we would literally need
to say is ‘I have a sister her name is
Mariam,’ and we're going to sort of lose
that connecting word in the middle. So we
need to add ‘her.’ so we will have two
separate complete sentences, but they'll
be written as one long sentence to
convey this idea, like so. I have a sister
لي أخت اسمها مريم
So we don't have a
comma, we don't have a period, we have two
sentences that could stand on their own,
but in order to convey this sense you
say لي أخت اسمها مريم, a second complete
sentence with a pronoun that refers back
to that indefinite noun, the sister.
the أخت. Let's take this: ‘she is a
professor who teaches at Smith College.’
‘She is a professor,’ that's simple enough:
هي أستاذة
‘who teaches at Smith College,’ now in
order to create a second complete
sentence that جملة صفة, we're
going to need that pronoun, ‘she teaches
at Smith College,’ and we're going to lose
our connecting word in the middle, right?
Now we know that in Arabic, we don't
need to include a subject pronoun, a
separate subject pronoun in front of a
verb, necessarily. In the verb, the prefix
suffix combination on a present tense
verb often will give us the information
we need about the subject of the
sentence. So in Arabic we could say
هي أستاذة
تدرّس في جامعة سميث
And again, we have a complete sentence
here, a complete جملة فعلية
and our subject, that extra pronoun, is
included in the conjugation for تدرّس
‘she teaches,’ right when we see تدرّس,
we know that we're referring to that
feminine, third-person noun: هي أستاذة.
Let's take one more example. ‘I remember
it from a book that I read.’ Now, once more,
we need a pronoun that refers back to
that book that we're describing, that
we're providing additional information
about. And in this case the book is not
the subject of the verb, the book is
actually the object of the verb, right? What
did I read? I read it—that book.
The one I'm talking about.
So in Arabic, I would render it like this:
‘I remember it,’
a أتذكره, I remember it, object
pronoun, من كتاب قرأته.
So this ه, I read it, right? What did I
read? The كتاب, the book that we're
talking about. The same structure that we
use when we say ‘I remember it,’ so
literally we're saying ‘I remember it
from a book that I read it.’ In English, if
we actually rendered all of these
sentences literally in English the way
we're doing here, they would be
considered run-on sentences, right,
incorrect grammar, redundancy, unnecessary
pronouns. In Arabic we need to include
this when we're talking about an
indefinite noun. This is a very important
structure for reading comprehension; a
lot of the time when you're reading a
descriptive text that's introducing a
new idea, or talking about a new thing, it
will be described with جملة الصفة,
so it's important to be able to
recognize it as you're reading. One big
tell, one big clue, is when we have a noun,
an indefinite noun followed by a verb,
there's a very good chance that what
that verb is describing is going to be
the indefinite noun. and we're going to
have a جملة الصفة structure.