Marhaba! Right now we're going to talk about ordinal numbers in Arabic what we
call الأعداد الترتيبية.
Now ordinal numbers are the numbers that we use to order things, right? To arrange
them in a sequence. Second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, hundred and first, etc. In
Arabic, there is a pretty linear relationship between the cardinal number,
right, the numbers that you learned in counting forms, 1, 2, 3, واحد اثنين
ثلاثة, etc., and the ordinal numbers that we can get to, to count
things. What we can do is we look for the جذر, right, remember, the tri-consonantal
root, and then we can put it into the وزن, or pattern, فاعل, to refer to a sequence,
number, an ordinal number. For example, if we take the number 'five,' you probably
learned to count it as خمسة.
And if we look for the جذؤ, right, the tri-consonantal root, it's pretty
easy: we know 'taa marbuuTa' can't be part of a جذر, so we have 'khaa, miim, siin.' Again,
خمسة means 'five,' but we want to say 'fifth.' So we take these three letters and
we put them into the وزن of فاعل. Again, 'faa-ayn-laam,' these letters are just
placeholders for our وزن, for that pattern, that exoskeleton that we're
using. So we wind up with خامس, the fifth of something. Here we have a chart
with numbers from 1 through 12, and they're ordinal forms. You can see there
are a couple of little exceptions. First of all the number, the ordinal number, for
first, الأوّل or الإولى, doesn't share the جذر with واحد, the number one that you've
probably learned. Just like 'one' and 'first' in English don't quite share the
relationship that 'three' and 'third' do. It's a little bit of an irregularity. And
the other thing is that the number 'six,' you probably learn as ستة when you
were counting, but the root is actually 'siin-daal-siin,' so when we unfold the
جذر ,of the word, that triconsonantal root and we put it into this
pattern, we wind up with السادس or السادسة. That's another thing: since
these numbers, these ordinal numbers are all adjectival, right, they function
essentially as adjectives, 'the third book,' 'the fourth table,' etc., they can be
feminine, they can have feminine endings when we're referring to something
feminine. So let's take a couple of examples. If we wanted to say 'Arabic is
my third class on Monday,' for example, we would say
العربية صفّي...
'My third class.' I want to talk about this صف in an adjectival form. Okay, so I
know that this is a pronoun, a possessive pronoun, but صف is masculine, and it's
definite, so I'm going to need to talk about it being my third class, use the
masculine form...
صفّي الثالث في يوم الاثنين.
Or for example, if I want to say 'this is the sixth week,' or 'we are in the sixth
week of this semester,' we could say
نحن في الأسبوع..
week, okay so I want
to describe it as the sixth week, and أسبوع again أسبوع is masculine, we don't have
a 'taa marbuuTa,' so
الأسبوع السادس في هذا الفصل الدراسي.
Or if we wanted to say this is... 'I am in my fourth year at the University,' I could
say, or 'this is my fourth year at the University,' I could say
هذه سنتي ...
my year, my fourth year, right, سنة, we remember, is a word that has a 'taa marbuuTa'
at the end, so it's grammatically feminine, we're going to need to have it
agree, so if we're describing it as a 'fourth year,' we would have to say
سنتي الرابعة
with the 'taa marbuuTa,' 53 00:05:53,500 --> 00:00:00,000 في الجامعة.