Ahlan wa sahlan! Right now, we're going to talk about
derived verb patterns II and V, what we would call in Arabic
وزن فعّل
and وزن تفعّل
Remember that Arabic convention dictates that we refer to these forms by their past tense conjugation for هو
In English, we often refer to them just as Form II and Form V.
Mechanically, the great thing about all of these derived verb patterns is that
they're going to stay pretty much the same. If I know how to conjugate one, if I know how the vowels work with one,
I know how they all work.
So for Form II in the present tense,
I would need to add that 'shadda' on the middle letter of the جذر, the root,
and possibly change the vowels in the present tense, So instead of يَفعَل in Form I, I have يُفَعِّل
in Form II. We already know this verb يُدَرِّس,
'to teach', and notice that Form II
often has kind of a transitive meaning. It usually takes an object--usually, not always always,
but usually, and it often has
the meaning of 'to make someone or something do Form I'. The form I of that same جذر, 'daal raa siin',
is
يَدرُس
So when we 'teach'
عندما هو يُدَرِّس
Ostensibly, someone who teaches is making someone else study or learn.
Another good example would be the verb يَحمَل
which in form I means 'to carry',
but in form II
means something like 'to load up', right? The way you load up a ship or a donkey. You make someone or something else carry things.
So if I want to apply the same paradigm, the same template
Just add these vowels, add that 'shadda', and I wind up with
يُحَمِّل
So these are what change. Form II also can have a meaning of
intensifying an action. In Form I we have a verb, يَقطَع
Which sort of means 'to cut'.
We could say, for example, هو يقطع الورقة, 'he cuts the paper'. Maybe he takes a piece of scissors
and slices it right in half.
But in Form II
it has a slightly different, more specific meaning of 'chopping something up'
into little bits, so
In Form II, we might say
يُقَطِّع الخضروات
I'm running out of room here. خضروات 'He cuts up the vegetables to make dinner.'
Form V is formed
--again, just following this pattern--
one little difference is that the present tense vowels are all 'fathas'
until we get to the case ending at the end, which we don't need to worry about discussing right now,
but we also have a 'taa' at the beginning that we tack on to the
beginning of the جذر. That 'taa' is always going to be there, it's going to stick there
in the past tense, in the present tense, in the مصدر.
One Form V verb that you might know is
يتخصّص
present tense conjugated for هو
يتخصّص
meaning 'to specialize'. Notice that Form V verbs, again, are usually pretty intransitive in meaning.
Often they're reflexive. The subject of the verb is also the object. I can say هو يتخصّص في الهندسة
'He specializes in engineering' or
أنا أتخصّص في اللغة العربية
'I specialize in the arabic language'
But I can't really
"specialize" someone else right? I could be an advisor to someone, I could help them, but this verb can't really be used
to refer to someone else.
Often we see sort of matching pairs of Form II and Form V verbs that work together
so that we can express those shades of meaning
sometimes you want to talk about something with an object, changing another thing,
or another person, sometimes you want to talk about internal changes that happen
to or within oneself.
So the verb in Form II for 'change' in Arabic would be, in the past tense,
غيّر
Again, we add that 'shadda'.
This is in the past tense. So if I want to say 'I changed the color of the kitchen', I could say
غيّرتُ لون المطبخ
The color was one thing. I went and changed it. I am the subject, the color, لون المطبخ, is the object.
if I want to talk about
internal or spontaneous changes, though,
I would need to use Form V,
Because that is the reflexive,
internal kind of change, so I would take the same جذر, 'ghain, yaa, raa',
and I would put it into form five. I would add that taa and keep the 'shadda',
For example, my sister, she changed after she went and studied at college.
تغيّرَتْ أختي بعد الدراسة في الجامعة
This seems like a little thing, but it really is important,
because it's slightly incorrect if we use one where we mean another. If I said
غيّرت أختي بعد الدراسة بعد الدراسة في الجامعة
in Arabic it would leave my interlocutor, the person listening to me, with kind of a question.
Okay, what did she change? My sister changed... something. غيّرتْ... شيء آخر
Or if I said, hmm...
تغيّر لون المطبخ
that would imply a spontaneous change in the color of the kitchen wall.
Hmm, do we have a leak somewhere? Why is it brown when yesterday it was white? It would have certain very different implications.
One other example, just to demonstrate how this pair works.
You might remember the word سوق meaning 'a market', a place where we go to buy things.
And we can take that جذر,
'siin, waaw, qaaf', and turn it into two verbs. If I use Form II, then it means 'to market something',
in the business sense. So I could say
'The company markets clothes.'
تسوِّق الشركة الملابس.
here I have an object. What does
The شركة 'market,' what are they trying to sell? ملابس. But if I use it in Form V,
it means 'market' in a different sense, kind of more like 'to go marketing' or more simply in
colloquial English, 'to go shopping,' so I could say
'I go shopping,' literally 'I go marketing every Saturday.' That's why I buy my groceries and my toothpaste,
etc., etc.
أتسوّق في يوم السبت.
'I get my shopping done on Saturday.'
Not all roots, not all جذور are going to use both forms in every single case,
but in general these are a pretty predictable pair.
So we want to learn to recognize them when we're reading, when we're listening, and
think about the implications for any given sentence because it can affect things, and we definitely want to
start trying to control them, so that we wind up
saying exactly what we mean so that we wind up talking about 'me painting the kitchen wall,' changing the color myself, instead of implying that
Something fishy is going on in my house.