Ahlan wa sahlan! Right now I want to talk with you about 'haal'
clauses. حال
means like a state or a
circumstance. You probably recognize that word from the formal Arabic greeting كيف الحال. We're really saying, 'how is your state,' right?
So 'haal' clauses are a construction that we can use to describe
the state of a subject while they're performing
another action.
How an action was undertaken. We encounter 'haal' clauses all the time in Arabic, especially for
narration of events. In English, there are a couple of ways we can express this idea:
we can use a gerund, we could say something like 'I walked the streets
looking for my cat,' or we often use a preposition like 'with' or 'when,' or 'while,' like
'I played basketball when I was in high school,'
or 'she walked into the office with the letter in her hand,' things like that. In Arabic,
we express these ideas a lot of the time using 'haal' causes, and there are three ways that I'd like to talk about.
First is a nominal sentence beginning with 'waaw' and a pronoun. so a الجملة الاسمية
التي تبدأ بـ"واو"
والضمير
We can also
use a regular present tense verb, a فعل مضارع, and we can use اسم الفاعل or اسم المفعول
in the منصوب. Now that third option here,
there's actually a separate video on it that you can go and check out, so I'm going to focus on the other two in
this video. There are a couple more ways
but these are what I'm going to focus on right now, because they're really simple, really useful ways to
lengthen an idea.
So
If we want to construct a
حال applause with a 'waaw' and a pronoun, the pronoun can be a subject pronoun, or it can be a possessive pronoun attached to a
different noun or preposition.
So let's take a couple of examples. If we wanted to say, for example,
'he got dressed as he watched the news,' or 'he got dressed while watching the news,' we could say لبس ملابسه...and
then we would just take a 'waaw'
Plus the هو for him:
وهو يشاهد الأخبار
Notice that if you, like me, think in English a lot of the time, and
are tempted to sort of back-translate what we're working on into English, that و
we know that و sometimes means 'and,' but 'and,' doesn't really fit with the idea of this sentence. If we translated it very literally,
we would be saying something like "he put on his clothes and
he watches the news."
We need to be able to step outside of that literal-translation box a little bit for
this sentence to make sense. Or if I wanted to say "I graduated from college
when I was 22 years old,"
we could say in Arabic تخرّجتُ من الجامعة
...وأنا في الثانية والعشرين من عمري.
Literally something like "and I am in my
22nd year." 'Once again,
in order to get that "when I was twenty-two..." meaning, we have to
not think very literally in English, right? The 'waaw' is just a connector of these two ideas. It's putting them
temporally right next to each other. As I said, we don't always need a subject pronoun like أنا now or هو.
We can also use a possessive pronoun. For example, if we wanted to say "they went to the party with their friend
Nadia,"
we could say ذهبوا إلى الحفلة...
ومعهم صديقتهم نادية.
Now as I said the other way that I want to talk about
that we can create a حال clause is using a regular old present tense verb. In a case like this, we aren't going to have anything between
the first clause and the second clause. We're just going to begin a
جملة فعلية with a present tense verb. So: خرجوا إلى الشوارع... "they went into the streets,
...demanding their rights," let's say. In a case like that, we could also say خرجوا إلى الشوارع
يطالبون بحقوقهم.
Now here, we have a third-person plural
past-tense verb, and the same people who are doing the 'going into the streets' are doing the 'demanding.' So...
Oops, I missed a dot here... يطالبون is conjugated in the third-person plural just like خرجوا
"They went into the streets-they demand their rights,' is how it literally reads in English. But once again, we can't
get too literal here. We have to understand
that this يطالبون just refers to an event that was happening in the past, and that was happening concurrently
with the action of that first verb: "they went into the streets demanding their rights," or
"while demanding their rights,"
something like that. Or we could say
"He sat by the telephone
thinking about what to say."
جلس بجانب التلفون...
and then we just use a present-tense verb. And since جلس is conjugated for هو in the past tense
يفكّر, that verb, is going to be conjugated for هو too:
يفكّر في ما سيقوله.
"thinking about what to say," or literally, sort of, "thinking about what he will say it,"
we add that pronoun there. But the important thing again, is that يفكّر,
the "thinking," was happening at the same time as
the "sitting." Those two actions are concurrent. You may be thinking
"wait a minute, some of these sentences could
go either way!" and you'd be absolutely right. There's no reason that we can't
make a حال clause with the 'waaw' and
the pronoun here: جلس بجانب التلفون وهو يفكّر في ما سيقوله. The difference is mostly just
stylistic, it depends on which
rhythm, which
rhetorical style you wish to choose. Often we can get away with either one. I will mention that with this third version,
we tend to use the اسم فاعل or اسم مفعول pattern, which again you can watch another video about
for actions that are more 'stative,' that have to do with 'states of
being. So if we wanted to say something like 'he left the house
wearing a shirt,' or 'wearing a new shirt,' let's say.
'Wearing' is is not
the most active verb, it's more a state of being. Either you're wearing the shirt, or you're not wearing the shirt.
So while technically it would be possible to say
something like
ترك البيت وهو يلبس قميصه الجديد
There's nothing grammatically incorrect about that, but because
يلبس
isn't the most active verb, it sounds a little bit odd.
Like he's really deliberately, actively, consciously wearing that shirt! Which isn't the normal sense of that particular verb.
So in cases like that, when we're talking about 'wearing,' or
'sleeping,' or
something along those lines we might prefer option three, so we could say لابساً
Instead. Now in terms of how we get there, that's a
multi-step process, so if you're curious
you can go watch the separate video on using اسم الفاعل and اسم المفعول in حال clauses.
But all three of these ways are really central to
narration in Arabic, and if you want to express concurrent ideas and actions, this is a great way to get that message across.