Ahlan wa sahlan! Right now we're gonna talk
about how to form conditional sentences
in Arabic, sentences that allow us to
express the ideas of possibility. ‘If X,
then Y. First we're going to talk about
how to express these ideas in MSA, in فصحى,
modern Standard Arabic, and then
we're going to talk a little bit about
how we can use them in dialects. So
in formal Arabic there are two words that
we use very often to express the
conditional possibilities. We can use the
word إذا, or we can use the word لو.
إذا and لو differ in that إذا is
used to express conditions that might be
fulfilled, and لو is used to express a
conditional idea that is contrary to
fact, right, conditions that are
impossible, or that just aren't going to
be fulfilled. لو is a good conditional
for love songs, right, ‘if you were my
sweetheart, if I had only known…’ that kind
of impossibility. So, formal Arabic has
some pretty firm grammatical rules about
how we use these two words. After each of
them, we need to have a past tense verb,
even if the idea involves the future as
we're going to see in our examples, and
often in فصحى, we have a sort of
particle to introduce the result clause,
the ‘then,’ right? ‘If X, then Y.’ So let's
take an example. The particles for
إذا our particle is going to be فَـ
and for لو our particle is going to be
لَـ
So for example, if I want to say ‘if I
study, I will pass the test,’ or ‘I will
succeed on the test,’ is what we would say
in Arabic. So I can say إذا درستُ
فسأنجح
في الامتحان
so إذا درستُ, remember again I'm
saying ‘if I study,’ if this condition is
fulfilled in the future, right, there is a
test, I want to study for it, even though
we're talking about the future, because
of the rules of conditional sentences in
formal Arabic, I have to say درستُ
conjugated for the past. Future idea,
forced by grammatical circumstances to
use the past tense.
إذا درستُ فسأنجح في الامتحان
I will succeed in, I will pass the test.
So we have our future marker سَـ
and then فَـ connects right with it.
‘faa’ really corresponds very well to the
‘then’ in an if/then clause in English. In
English we can usually get away without
the ‘then’ part. I could also say ‘if
I study, I will pass the test.’ I don't
need that ‘then.’ I could include it, I
could skip it. In formal Arabic it's a
good idea to include it. Let's take
another example. لو‫…‬ لَـ For that
impossibility. Suppose you don't speak
Spanish, right, and you encounter a
Spanish speaker who doesn't speak any
language you speak, and we want to say to
you ‘if you spoke Spanish, you would
understand him.’
so I say لو
تكلّمت اللغة الاسبانية
لفهمته.
‘If you spoke Spanish,’ which you don't and
you aren't going to learn somehow
magically in the next 30 seconds, ‘then
you would understand him.’ or ‘you would
have understood him.’ Here we have
the past tense, to express that sort of
‘would,’ that unfulfilled ‘would’ condition, we
often hear the past tense here. So
in dialect, things are slightly different.
For one thing, the إذا‫/‬لو distinction
in terms of impossibility versus
possibility isn't as prominent. In fact,
what we tend to hear typically is that
in Levantine dialect no matter what sort
of condition we're talking about, we're
usually going to hear إذا, or it's
often pronounced ‘izaa,’ right, our ‘dhaal’ sort of
elides into a ‘z’ sound, and in Masri, in
Egyptian, again no matter what the
circumstance, whether we're talking about
a real possibility or a pie-in-the-sky
possibility, we're probably just going to
hear لو. In Egyptian, we still retain
that past tense verb, most of the time,
even if, again, we're talking about future
possibilities. So for example if we
want to say ‘if you go to the party you
will see Fatima,’ right a woman named
Fatima, we could say لو رحت الحفلة
حتشوف فاطمة
So here we are, we're talking about the
future but that past-tense verb رحت, if
you went, is going to follow لو just
because that's the convention. In
Levantine dialect we have a little more
flexibility. Sometimes you'll hear past
and sometimes you'll hear present so we
could render the very same sentence in
Shaami dialect, in Levantine dialect, as
إذا بتروح عَ الحفلة رح تشوف فاطمة.
We could also put it in the past tense,
it might indicate a slightly greater
degree of ‘iffiness,’ you're a little more
unsure of whether or not you're going to
go. But typically speaking you have the
choice in Shaami of whether to use past
or present. And that is the conditional
in Arabic!