Sabaa7 al-kheir! Right now, I want to talk with you about a structure called تمييز, which means something like
'specification' in Arabic, and how we can use it to convey more sophisticated
superlative and comparative ideas.
I'm assuming that you know how
simple superlatives and comparatives work in Arabic, and that you're familiar with
the shift in vowel that happens. We get a lot of adjectives from this فَعيل pattern, like كبير لطيف غريب
and then to make them comparative or superlative, we can just put them into this
أفعَل pattern كَبير أكبر, bigger or biggest
لَطيف, even more nice even nicer, ألطف, but
غريب, أغرب:the very strangest. The issue arises though when we try to use other
adjectives, ones that don't fit into those three- or four-letter patterns, and we want to make them comparative or superlative.
Adjectives like مزدحم, which means crowded or منتشر, which means
'widespread.'
How are we going to take that word and put it into the أفعل pattern? Well, the answer is we can't,
really, because too much information is tied up in that specific pattern. We can't just change the pattern.
Typically,
When we're gonna use تمييز for a structure like this, we're working with an adjective that's derived from a verb pattern
that isn't form I, right? Forms II through X.
Don't over complicate things--if that's over-complicating it,
you don't need to think about it too too much. But we have a slightly different,
multi-step process for taking a word like مزدحم for 'crowded' and
saying
'more crowded' or 'the most crowded.' Here's what we need to do. One,
we need to figure out the verb
that this adjective comes from.
Most words in Arabic
are associated with or related to a specific verb.
So in this case, if we look at it and maybe go to our dictionary, we can figure out that it's a form VIII verb,
and that the verb form in the past tense conjugate it for هو is
ازدحم
The 'daal' is actually a stand-in for a 'taa.' So that's a little bit irregular, but it shouldn't throw us off too much.
Now we need to take that verb and move it
Into its مصدر form--put it into its مصدر, which for a form VIII verb is super-regular.
We can just add 'alif' between the last two letters, and we get ازدحام.
Finally,
we take that مصدر form of this verb, that was derived from the adjective, and we make it منصوب.
We keep it indefinite, but we make it
منصوب.
With تنوين: ازدحاماً
And
then, we can put it in a sentence, along with a helping أفعَل pattern. So let's take an actual example, and
Make it less abstract. If we wanted to say 'Cairo is more crowded than Casablanca,' we would do this:
القاهرة... and now I want to say it's
'more crowded.' Here we have ازدحام, 'crowdedness,' and ازدحاماً in the منصوب meaning sort of like
'crowdedly,' or 'in terms of
crowdedness,' so we could say
القاهرة أكثر ازدحاماً...
Oops, I forgot the 'daal' there, ازدحاماً
من الدار البيضاء.
So we used أكثر here to give the idea of 'more,' and
Then we used ازدحاماً to specify what kind of 'more' we mean, right? "More crowded,
more in terms of crowdedness,
than
Casablanca." let's take another example. Um, I saw an unfortunate headline in
an Arabic news website the other day that said "fake news is more widespread than real news."
Using a
version of
this adjective:منتشر. منتشر means widespread, but we want to say 'more widespread,'
so again, I need to figure out what the verb is. In this case, it's also form VIII verb:
انتشر
Past tense, conjugated for هو. Now, I need to put it into its مصدر form, which again is just going to be
adding an 'alif' the end:
انتشار
and 3--for space, I'm not going to draw this one out--I need to add
that منصوب ending while keeping it--excuse me--while keeping it indefinit-- and then I can put it into my sentence:
What did it say...
الأخبار الكاذبة أكثر انتشاراً من الصحيحة.
"Lying news is more widespread than true news." Where again, we're using أكثر to say 'more,' and
then انتشاراً to specify
لنُمَيِّز
what kind of more. More widespread, "more spreadedly."
If you will. Sometimes it helps me to think of it
that way, using an awkward English grammar. If that works for you, great. If not, don't even worry about it.
Sometimes, in order to have a more coherent sentence that has more information at the end, we need to add information
after the تمييز.
For example, if we wanted to express that "Saudi Arabia is the biggest producer of oil
in the Arab world," or "the biggest,
the largest
Arab nation in terms of production of oil," we can also use تمييز and say something like
السعودية أكبر دولة عربية...
So, "the biggest Arab nation," and now I want to say "in terms of production of oil."
Produce, or "producer," let's say, "producing," is
مُنتِج, that's a form IV verb that it's derived from, أنتَجَ
And we might know that from the vowel pattern here, if not, we would have to go and look it up.
This can be a process that takes a little bit of time, especially when we're getting it under our belts. So ,منتِج
أنتَجَ is our verb and the مصدر is
إنتاج, so
What I'm going to do is make it منصوب, and then I'm almost done:
إنتاجاً...
So "the largest Arab nation in terms of production..." إنتاجاً
Now, I want say "in terms of production of oil." With a phrase like "production of oil," you might be thinking
Oh, ok "X of Y." We might be able to use an إضافة here. However,
Because this needs to be truly indefinite,
we can't use an إضافة. So in order to create that
subordinate, possessive, "of" kind of meaning, we need to use the helping particle
لِـ
If we wanted to say something like "in terms of production of oil. إنتاجاً للنفط
Another example: if we wanted to say "Sarah loves sports most among all our siblings," we could
say something like
سارة أكثر إخوتها...
"In terms of love of sports," is what we want to do. Now, we probably know the word for 'love,'
we don't need a مصدر every single time. We can also use regular nouns, although حب happens to be the مصدر of the
Verbs for "love," right?, it's a it's a normal-ish word. So we could just say
حباً...
"In terms of love of sports," but once again, we've got that
تمييز, it needs to be indefinite
so we use the لِـ
to connect it to the word that follows.
حباً للرياضة. "in terms of love of sports." Notice that a lot of these sentences,
we really would just need to rephrase in English. It's difficult, often, to
take the word order in Arabic when we're using a تمييز construction like this, and
retain it in English. It can sound pretty awkward. So when we're thinking back and forth, we need to recognize that
fact, and not be slaves to
the syntax or word order, or exact phraseology of one thing or the other. Some things just work better
in one language, and don't work that well in another.
One of the case I want to talk about, is sometimes when we're using a word
in تمييز and
the word, the verb, that we're working with has a
particle, has a preposition that
belongs to it, then we keep that preposition and that obviates the need for the لِـ that we've used here.
أنتجَ and
حبّ, أحبّ
don't tend to have a preposition between them and their object. So we needed that helping لِـ. But suppose we wanted to say
"He was more pleased with the museum than I was." That verb for pleasing and being pleased
with something typically takes the preposition بِـ
So I'll spare you the trouble of going through those steps except to say that
the مصدر in منصوب would be إعجاباً بِـ
So I want to say "he was more than
me..." Oh, you know what? Let's make it "less," since we haven't said that yet. He was less pleased with the museum than I was.
كان أقلّ...
Opposite of أكثر, أقلّ... "he was less pleasedly," less pleased...
بالمتحف مني So "he was less pleased-ly about the museum
than I was." There, we would retain that بِـ because it's just the preposition that must, in most cases,
follow
That verb from which we get our مصدر.
One final note is that we can in fact use
This تمييز and a helping أفعل pattern to express
comparatives and superlatives
even with
adjectives that normally fit into the أفعل pattern. That's one way to do it.
But it's not something that we are bound to by any means, and sometimes we want
the extra Arabic
rhetorical flavor of this structure in our own writing or formal speaking. So for example, if we wanted to say
"the dog is nicer than the cat..."
That's not a statement I'm making, it's just an example sentence that I want to use. We could say
الكلب ألطف من القطة.
Normal superlative pattern, ألطف من... fine, no big deal. But we can also say
الكلب أكثر من القطة لطفاً.
"The dog is more than the cat in terms of
kindness," or if we wanted to retort that the cat was
smarter than the dog, we have a normal adjective,
ذكي, that we can put into that أفعل pattern, أذكى, so we could say
القطة أذكى من الكلب
Or,
we could take the مصدر of that verb for "being smart," that noun that sort of means
"intelligence," or "being intelligent" and
say
القطة أكثر من الكلب ذكاءً.
"The cat is more than the dog in terms of smartness, in terms of intelligence."
It's a choice that we can make, and it has
pretty much no difference in meaning, but it is a fun way, if the mood strikes us, to add a certain
rhetorical flair. And again if you, like me, are not a first-language speaker of Arabic,
this is a nice structure to use when you want to demonstrate your knowledge of structures
that aren't very close to the English language, right?
We can't really get away with saying this in English using the exact phraseology, it would sound a bit strange.
But in Arabic, it sounds very elegant and very "native." So for that reason alone,
I would encourage you to incorporate it into your own speech and writing when possible.